Sorry. I Take That Back

The other day I wrote about a Christian friend who was mad at me. Another friend insists he’s not, but the texts suggest he is.

You can’t just ask a Christian if he’s mad at you, because they will always say no. You have to piece it together from clues.

You know how we are. “I’m going to pray for you” often means “I want to push your face in.”

He has invited me to a dinner function with other Christian men, on his dime. I accepted, but I was a little reluctant because of the timing and because of my many, many bad experiences with groups of self-identified Christians. Maybe I was rude, but I said I had to make something clear: I was never going to join a church again.

He said he knew that. Seemed a little annoyed, but I can’t really be sure.

I was afraid there was going to be an intervention. Let’s fix the backslider boy!

Some Christians evangelize for Yeshua, but most evangelize for churches. If you’re not going to church, you might as well be a crackhead who performs degrading services in exchange for small change. You have FALLEN AWAY, and they must go seek after the lost sheep.

Church Christians like to say we have to have “coverings.” If you don’t have a pastor, you have no covering, whatever that is. Like you’re doing an EVA without a spacesuit.

Coverings never worked for me. When I was a kid, I never saw a preacher who knew God or knew much of anything about him. They were able to dust off ancient notes and repeat sermons, and some were good at passing out communion and holding raffles and running church carnivals to raise money, but that was about it.

When I became an adult, things didn’t get much better. I had charismatic preachers, and they knew a few things about the Holy Spirit. That was helpful. They didn’t know they were supposed to pray in tongues a lot and receive revelation, however, so they mixed a lot of harmful excrement in with their teaching. Tithing, prosperity offerings, hard work, mindless submission to other human beings…the works.

They also discouraged talk of repentance. At my last church, there was a girl who kept coming in with new illegitimate babies, and they put her on the stage because she sang well. They never asked the obvious question: “When are you going to knock this off?”

The church before that was full of thieves, armed robbers, scammers, rappers, and strippers, and they were only too happy to put unrepentant people in ministry and hold them out as examples. I recall seeing one girl sing while her belly was so big it was like she was looking at the audience over the top of it.

Where there is no repentance, there is no salvation. That’s not me being self-righteous. That’s just how it is.

Most people have no idea what self-righteousness is. Giving useful criticism to others is not self-righteousness. We are required to do it. Yeshua did it and still does. The apostles did it. A self-righteous person doesn’t criticize himself. That’s the definition.

If I added up the hours I’ve spent criticizing myself and repenting this year alone, no one would believe me. God keeps waking me up at night.

Preachers think getting people into churches–their churches–is the most important thing in their lives. They also think that talking about repentance will keep butts out of seats, so they use “judge not” as an excuse to avoid it. They tell people God accepts they just as they are, which is not correct at all. They get lots of butts, but they’re the wrong butts. The wrong-butt people then end up running the church.

God eventually told me the church age was ending. Big churches had failed so catastrophically, he was giving up on them. This was necessary for a number of reasons I’m not going to get into now. God still wants us to assemble together, but you can do that in your backyard. Wherever two or more are gathered in his name, there he is among them.

When I tell people the church age is ending, they don’t like it. I think that must be because they are dependent on their churches, not the Holy Spirit. If they don’t go, they don’t feel God’s presence. They stop feeling clean. They feel like they’re not learning or improving.

It’s not supposed to work that way. You should bring God’s presence with you when you go to church. From your house. From your car. Otherwise, you’re showing up empty-handed.

The Holy Spirit should be with you wherever you are. If he’s not, something is wrong, and it’s disastrously wrong.

I hope they don’t try to drag me to churches. It would be nice to visit a church once in a while, but becoming a slave again and giving them over 10% of my income when I should be helping the poor instead…that will not happen unless I somehow become deranged.

I hope they don’t slander the Holy Spirit. If they ask me what’s happening in my walk, I will just tell them. God told me to stop going to church. God told me to stop tithing. God told me to pray in the Spirit a great deal. God told me preachers compete with the poor for money. God told me I had to do charity. God this and God that. I hope they don’t give me that, “Oh, another one,” grin and start talking about all the people who make up things God supposedly told them.

My friend belongs to the Assemblies of God. This outfit has produced a fair number of bad preachers. People like Swaggart and Bakker. It pushes the prosperity kickback scheme very, very hard. Trinity Church, my old church, was also an AG church.

I used to think the Assemblies of God was a charismatic church that promoted the Holy Spirit, but I found out that wasn’t true. They tell people to be baptized with the Spirit, and they get them started speaking in tongues, but then they stop. It’s like recruiting new soldiers and sending them straight from the recruiting station into battle. No weapons. No training. No communication with officers and instructors.

If you pray in tongues a lot, God WILL give you revelation, and you WILL have testimony. The vast majority of AG people don’t do it. They are there for prosperity, marriage, babies, healing, and the social life. And in many cases, money.

I figured most people in my church would be full of the Holy Spirit and that we would help others fill up. No such luck.

I would say AG people, and most people from charismatic churches, are just greedy Baptists who believe in miracles but don’t actually expect them. Not literally Baptists, but functionally similar. Nominal charismatics.

Nominal charismatics don’t have revelation or testimony, and they scoff at those who do. “I didn’t get it, so you’re not getting it, either.” They assume you’re lying or deceived when you talk about what God does for you.

This is how you can become a lifelong Christian who has never left a charismatic denomination and still end up slandering the Holy Spirit, living in defeat, being puffed up with pride like a bullfrog in mating season, and missing out on enormous blessings.

You can be a missionary, nurse the sick in a hospital in India, wash the feet of the homeless, preach with a bullhorn every day, memorize the whole Bible, smuggle Bibles into godless countries, drive the church bus, coach volleyball at Christian youth camp, lead the choir, compose hymns, and still have a lifestyle of slandering the Holy Spirit and thereby persecuting people who are doing better than you are.

Dormant, stunted charismatics who served churches instead of the Holy Spirit persecuted me at my last two churches. I didn’t have much trouble at all with unbelievers or the voodoo people who infest Miami. Preachers and volunteers made me miserable.

I joked to my friend about God telling me to buy my wife stuff, which is a privilege on both ends. He said Kenneth Copeland claimed God told him to buy his wife an $18 million mansion.

Was he slandering the Holy Spirit? I have to wonder. God really does tell me to buy my wife things. God tells Spirit-led Christians to do all kinds of things.

My wife lived in poverty until God joined us. She washed her clothes in a bucket. Much of the time, she had no hot water. She shared a hovel with two other women. She couldn’t afford to have a lost tooth replaced. To get up to the standard of a normal American women, she needs to be given some things other women here already have. Jewelry, shoes, clothing, medical care, and so on. She should be expected to require above-average expenditures until she levels up.

I’m not Kenneth Copeland. Copeland is a notorious fool and egomaniac who has lied for a living for decades. He’s a nasty person, and it is obvious his sick, worship-like covetousness didn’t come from God. Comparing the two of us would be absurd, and the absurdity is extremely obvious. You can’t miss it unless you want to. Surely my friend was not comparing me to him.

My sense is that he was trying to tell me I was claiming to have a relationship with God that I don’t really have. Like Copeland. If the Assemblies of God is what it should be, no AG member should be skeptical when another claims to hear from God. It should be disturbing when they say they don’t hear from him.

I have noticed that when we’re together, he keeps questioning my words, beliefs, and actions and asking me to defend myself as a Christian. I have never done that to him.

Maybe I’m wrong about the Copeland thing. Benefit of the doubt and so on.

My wife and I saw a funny video the other day. Maybe it wasn’t funny. Copeland had been given a Bentley. He was talking about it. He bowed his head and, in a reverent and highly emotional tone, said, “Ohhhhhhhh, thank you, Jesus!” He sounded like a junkie who had just recovered his stash of heroin after dropping it in a storm drain. It almost sounded sexual. He was overwhelmed with emotion. Over a car. A car no one told God to give him.

I dread going to the dinner for the same reason I avoid Christian forums. My concern is that I may be lectured and “corrected” by people who don’t know anything and who may be motivated by pride.

Christian forums are amazing. They’re like correction demolition derbies. Everyone wants to correct, and it’s not because they want to help or because they want others to avoid making the mistakes they’ve made. It’s because they have Smartest Boy in Class Syndrome. And most of what they say is wrong. Sometimes it ends with, “I’m going to pray for you!”, which, to many Christians, is synonymous with the middle finger.

A long time ago, I learned that I can’t help groups. I have managed to help individuals, but never groups. Satan works through groups.

My young friend Travis, who died in 2020 after a ghetto friend who was showing off a new gun shot him in the chest, thought he would save the black race. He was always mentoring kids. He thought he could save the ghetto, and he wanted to live there while he did it.

I told him that in 20 years, the people he knew would be exactly as they were at the time I was speaking to him. I told him that if he wanted to help, he needed to leave the ghetto and come back on weekends to reach a few people.

The same principle applies to Christians, generally. If you soak in their presence all the time, you will be distracted, misinformed, used, and persecuted. You need to spend a lot of time apart from them and avoid turning them into your consuming club. It’s better to be with a few people here and there.

I’m probably overly concerned. PTSD from past dealings with churches. Maybe I’ll have a great time.

My friend means well. I should appreciate it when people try to help.

One of the great things about my wife is that when I get a revelation that isn’t part of the church-worship belief structure, she never tries to correct me. She never accuses me. She never hands me a woke line in order shame me. She pipes up right away with a scripture confirming what I said, and then we have a discussion in which the Holy Spirit expands on it.

I have one person, on the entire planet, who listens with God’s ear and doesn’t fight with me.

This is a wife’s proper function. If your wife is constantly trying to correct you, or she’s always praying for God to correct you, one of you is married to the wrong person.

In any case, I am going to the dinner. Pray for me. And not in that, “I’m going to pray for you,” kind of way.

Not Every Tramp is a Tramp for the Lord

A friend of mine is mad at me.

I sent him and another friend a link to a Fox News story celebrating slutty Halloween costumes celebrities were wearing. I listed some types of familiar costumes. Slutty nurse. Slutty bride. Slutty vampire. You can finish the list.

He got mad and said I was using crass language, and he said I was using “slut” to “define women.” That’s a false accusation. On his part, I mean. If he meant I was trying to give women a label for the purpose of condemning them, he was wrong. If he meant I was defining actual sluts, meaning individuals who were bona fide sluts, well, okay, he was right. He mentioned the one true judge, meaning I was not entitled to call anyone a whore.

This is an important subject, because whorish women now have unprecedented power in America. We literally make them billionaires, and we make them co-parents by encouraging our kids to watch them and listen to them.

Back when I was an armorbearer at Trinity Church, or maybe it was right after I left, Kim Kardashian visited. I was not present. The other armorbearers had to put her in a front-row seat and treat her like Yeshua himself. She was honored during the service, and afterward, “pastor” Rich Wilkerson went to the Internet to post a photo showing everyone that the goddess had visited HIS church, and he wrote, “What a great friend.”

Kim Kardashian is a slut. She is the most famous and powerful slut in America. Bigger than Madonna ever was. A slut is a woman with loose sexual morals and/or a woman who has many sexual partners.

She made a porn video and sold it on the web. Her co-star says her mother was in the room, directing the video. She has posed for Playboy. She has posed naked in other places. She has never repented.

This is what comes of misapplying “judge not” and bowing and scraping in order to put butts in church seats regardless of what kind of people the butts belong to.

Rich Wilkerson teaches tithing and giving extravagant offerings. If he can get a billionaire to join his trashy church, he can cash in like never before. I believe this is why he sucks up to rich people. He puts them in the green room behind the stage and fawns on them. I never saw a person in need treated like that at Trinity, but I did see him ask us to shoo them away.

As to my friend, I pointed out a few things, but I didn’t convince him. I’m not angry, but he pretty clearly is. I’m a little frustrated, but I’m not angry.

First of all, every word in the Bible can be attributed to every part of the Trinity. They are unified. If Yeshua or the Holy Spirit or Yahweh said it, or an anointed person said it while God spoke through him, it can be attributed to all three of them. Yeshua wrote the Ten Commandments, for example. It’s not like Yahweh wrote them and Yeshua said, “Wow, that seems pretty harsh to me.”

Also, I’m entitled to use any word an anointed person used, because as a Holy-Spirit-baptized Christian who listens to the the Holy Spirit, I am anointed. Anointing refers to authority. As long as I’m not out of line, and I have heard from the Holy Spirit, I have authority. It’s not like Paul is a general and I’m a private. We both answer directly to God.

With that in mind…

The word “whore” and synonyms and related words are all over the Bible, in both testaments, spoken and written by God himself as well as prophets and apostles. “Whorish woman.” “Whoring.” “Whoredom.” “Harlot.” “Whoremonger.”

It gets worse. God called Israel an ass in heat.

If you want to see something shocking, read Ezekiel 23:20. “Flesh” is a reference to private parts.

There is no point in referring to the Old Testament any further to prove “whore” is an acceptable and valuable term. Anyone who disputes the fact that “whore” and related terms are all over it is either lying or unfamiliar with the Bible. It’s like saying there are no mice in Disney cartoons.

As for the New Testament, which is where flesh-led Christians find a Yeshua who never judges and is basically a gay version of Buddha, well, hold onto your socks.

First Corinthians 6:15-16:

Know ye not that your bodies are the members of Christ? shall I then take

the members of Christ, and make them the members of an harlot? God forbid.

What? know ye not that he which is joined to an harlot is one body? for two, saith he, shall be one flesh.

Ephesians 5:5:

For this ye know, that no whoremonger, nor unclean person, nor covetous man, who is an idolater, hath any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God.

First Timothy 1:9-11:

Knowing this, that the law is not made for a righteous man, but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and for sinners, for unholy and profane, for murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers, for manslayers,

For whoremongers, for them that defile themselves with mankind, for menstealers, for liars, for perjured persons, and if there be any other thing that is contrary to sound doctrine;

According to the glorious gospel of the blessed God, which was committed to my trust.

Hebrews 11:31:

By faith the harlot Rahab perished not with them that believed not, when she had received the spies with peace.

Rahab was an ancestor of Yeshua, and the Bible still calls her a whore, which she was at the time she helped the spies.

Hebrews 13:4:

Marriage is honourable in all, and the bed undefiled: but whoremongers and adulterers God will judge.

Revelation 17:1:

And there came one of the seven angels which had the seven vials, and talked with me, saying unto me, Come hither; I will shew unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters:

Revelation 17:15:

And he saith unto me, The waters which thou sawest, where the whore sitteth, are peoples, and multitudes, and nations, and tongues.

Revelation 17:16:

And the ten horns which thou sawest upon the beast, these shall hate the whore, and shall make her desolate and naked, and shall eat her flesh, and burn her with fire.

Revelation 19:2:

For true and righteous are his judgments: for he hath judged the great whore, which did corrupt the earth with her fornication, and hath avenged the blood of his servants at her hand.

Revelation 21:8:

But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death.

Revelation 22:15:

For without are dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie.

It is interesting that we are still “allowed” by the church to call murderers, thieves, liars, and other habitual sinners exactly what they are, and we can even say “adultery,” but we are not supposed to say “whore” or “pervert.”

Why is that? Satan shapes the language of the Spirit-denying church. He is using whores and perverts to destroy our connection to God, so he has banned terms that describe them accurately.

People claim words like “slut” and “whore” are derogatory in some special way, but that’s only because they describe people others find contemptible due to their behavior. The behavior made the terms distasteful. Call whores “sex workers” long enough, and “sex worker” will come to be considered offensive.

When I think about the way words fall into disapproval, I always think about “moron” and “imbecile,” which came to us from medicine. They were legitimate terms used to describe people with terrible problems. Naturally, they came to be used as insults. Then we were told to use another medical term: “retarded.” That became an insult. Then we were told to say “mentally challenged.” Soon after, I heard a kid ask another kid, “Are you challenged?”

When Yeshua called people fools, which he did several times in the Bible, he used a Greek word. The noun form is “more,” and it means an unintelligent person. It’s where “moron” comes from.

There is only so much you can do to make language pleasant to hear.

It’s not self-righteous to say “whore.” It’s self-righteous to say you are too good to say “whore.” John and Paul said it. Am I better than them?

Why do I not mention Yeshua, who used terms like “whore” in both testaments? Because my friend claimed only God had the right to say it. If John and Paul said it, and they were not out of line, then what he said isn’t true.

I don’t think my friend realized it, but unintentionally, he was implying he was better than I am because he doesn’t “judge.”

We are commanded to judge, by the way. Look at everything Yeshua said in the verse many Christians think constitutes the entire Bible:

Matthew 7:1-5:

Judge not, that ye be not judged.

For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.

And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?

Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.

No one quotes the whole passage. Just the part Satan likes. He liked it when the ancient Jews were too hard on sinners, and now he likes it when we refuse to correct them. He’s like a good lawyer. He can work with any parameters and make an argument.

Look at this passage from Ezekiel 3:

Son of man, a watchman I have given thee to the house of Israel, and thou hast heard from My mouth a word, and hast warned them from Me.

In My saying to the wicked: Thou dost surely die; and thou hast not warned him, nor hast spoken to warn the wicked from his wicked way, so that he doth live; he — the wicked — in his iniquity dieth, and his blood from thy hand I require.

Has the Old Testament been set aside by God? Astonishingly, many Christians think so. In reality, it can’t be set aside. We are not required to abide by certain rules the Jews had to follow, but the word is eternal. After all, it is the word itself that tells us we don’t have to follow those rules. Only the word has the authority to do that.

The Holy Spirit will generally tell us to do what God told the Jews to do before us, and he definitely wants us to warn people about sin and iniquity. How else are they supposed to know?

I showed my wife the conversation with my friend, and she expressed the same wonderment I do.

She has a niece. The niece hangs around drunk in bars. She has three small children by three men. At least one of the men is married. She makes her mother raise the kids. She leaves them for days at a time. She shows no signs of stopping. What are we supposed to call her? A great friend?

You’re not supposed to go outside with a megaphone and tell prostitutes, “YOU’RE ALL WHORES, AND YOU’RE GOING TO HELL, UNLIKE ME.” But you are supposed to call people what they are. It wakes them up, if they are willing, and it can turn them from destruction and help them live in God’s love every day.

I think my friend is a wonderful guy. He used to smuggle Bibles for Brother Andrew. He is kind and warm-hearted. He wants to please God. But I think he needs to get closer to the Holy Spirit.

It seems like he never has a testimony, and I have never heard him share revelation.

If you’re spending a lot of time with God every day, praying in tongues and bathing in the Spirit, you will have revelation every single day of your life. It won’t be something you saw Ray Comfort or the pope saying on TV. It will be something God told you directly. It may conflict with your church’s doctrine, and it may even seem to conflict with the Bible at first, but when you open the Bible and look, especially at the Greek, Aramaic, or Hebrew, you will see that there is no conflict.

If you spend time with God, you will also have all sorts of testimony.

The other day, I opened a dish in the microwave, and hot steam shot out onto my thumb. It kept hurting after it cooled off. I commanded the burn to go, and I commanded my flesh to be healed, and I asked God to back me up. The burn left, and within the hour, I was as though I had not been burned. That’s an example of testimony. I have lots of testimony. So does my wife. Hers is more amazing than mine. It’s not because we’re super-righteous. We are definitely not. It’s because we have spent time in the Spirit.

If you’re not spending time with God, how can you call him your father?

We are taught to be church-worshipers, which means man-worshipers. We know we’re not all that holy, so we go to church to listen to the really holy guys and give them money. We have the really holy guys pray for us instead of praying for each other, because we have no faith in our own prayers. We accept the doctrine the really holy guys teach us, as though they were God. After all, they have the big hats, the fancy cathedrals, the TV cameras, and the jets.

Then we find out they’re homosexuals and even homosexual predators. We find out they sleep with women they are supposed to lead. We learn that they made things up in order to get power and money. We find out we wasted our lives, displeasing God by following their false doctrine.

A church-worshipers are predictable. They get very angry when you question their denomination and their favorite preachers, as though doing so were blasphemy. They repeat certain bits of false doctrine predictably. Things like “judge not.” They may tell you it’s a sin to have a single drink; a lot of them do that, but it’s a lie, as Yeshua might tell you with a cup in his hand.

Often, they try to be holier than God himself. This usually manifests in niceness. God isn’t always nice, though. He killed nearly the entire human race once, and he is coming around for another pass soon. He is extremely blunt and open about sexual matters and toilet functions. He’s not a Victorian prude, running around putting skirts on table legs so they don’t give men impure thoughts.

God gave me a wonderful word once, and it suprised me. He said it in my own voice, directed to himself. He said, “I am not better than you.” To be clear, he was telling me I am not better than he is.

It sounds strange and obvious at first, but it’s very powerful.

Satan and his children are always claiming to be better than Christians and better than Yahweh. They’re nicer, they tell us. Of course, they are really angry and dangerous, but let’s not go down that rabbit hole. They tell us they love everyone. They tell us they’re superior because they don’t eat animals. They tell us sexual sin is virtuous and beneficial. They call whores “sex workers” because it sounds like a job, not like whoring and being enslaved by pimps.

When we refuse to judge, we are telling God we are better than he is. We are doing what Satan’s children do. What the “judge not” passage really means is that we have to judge ourselves first, fairly and honestly, before we judge other people and try to help them change.

Yeshua judged. All the writers of the New Testament judged. All the prophets judged. David judged in the Psalms. We are not better than God.

My friend is a church Christian. That’s why he doesn’t have revelation or testimony. He is doing his best to do what he has been taught by men. This is probably why his family has been destroyed and he has been separated from his wife and kids, although they might have abandoned him if he had done everything right. They have free will. It’s definitely why things aren’t getting better for him and why people are still abusing him and getting away with it.

I judge myself constantly. I keep asking God what I’m doing wrong to cause chronic problems, and I ask him to help me to stop, show me what to do to fix it, and help me to do the things that will turn the situation around. He told me to ask these things…because I spend time in the Spirit and receive revelation.

The ancient Jews also asked for correction when they were in trouble. They never said, “Well, we’re having a famine, so it must be because we’re the special, chosen, righteous people, and we’re doing everything right.” They fasted. They tore their clothes. They put ashes on their heads. They went to prophets and priests and asked them the same questions I asked, and what did God do? He answered them, and when they heeded his words, God fixed their problems.

When I didn’t spend time in the Spirit, I was ignorant, and I lived in defeat and depression. That’s not a mysterious aberration. That’s how life is supposed to work. You’re not supposed to be blessed if you shun the Holy Spirit. It’s not proof God doesn’t exist or doesn’t care about you. It’s evidence that his word is true.

I wasn’t a “good person” to whom “bad things” happened. God wasn’t testing me. He wasn’t showing me his greatness through my habitual, degrading defeats. He wasn’t teaching me to be strong. I get sick of hearing Christians claim failure is really victory. I wasn’t a martyr. I was just a loser, because I wasn’t connected to the person who gives us victory.

We need to quit asking God why bad things happen to good people. We need to quit promoting a dangerous lie. We need to ask what we’re doing wrong.

Just this morning, God gave me a relevant word: “Thank you for humbling correction.”

As for Halloween, I am glad it’s behind me and all the witches have gone home from their meetings where they cursed you and me and Israel and Donald Trump and Yeshua himself. I’m very glad I live behind a gate so no one gets to knock on my door and ask me why I don’t have candy for little children dressed like demons and vampires.

And sluts.

Can’t Get to the Parking Lot Fast Enough

For a long time, I’ve been telling people competitive sports are incompatible with Christianity. In America, this is like saying God himself is evil, because American men almost literally worship athletes, and the sports industry is their church. It makes people very angry. It really upsets the guys who have the mistaken impression that football is a great tool for building good Christians.

It is true, however. Our sick, deranged obsession with sports comes to us from the Greeks. They also exalted athletes and even treated them as gods after their victories. The Greeks were not Christians. This should be obvious. They worshiped childish false gods and decorated their front yards with statues featuring permanent erections, and they considered these statues sacred, not unlike the bizarre nudes found in many Catholic churches.

Today I got some wonderful confirmation.

I dreamed I was back in prep school. I was in history class. My teacher was Mr. Thomas. He taught me in ninth grade. Now that I think about it, he was the football coach.

Mr. Thomas was not a very nice guy. He wasn’t extremely abusive, but he was an angry leftist, and he was a little bit of a bully. Example: students complained that he kneed football players because he didn’t believe they were wearing protection.

I just realized how odd it was that he was a sports coach. He was about 5’7″ and maybe 260.

In the dream, I had already graduated from high school and college. For some reason, I was repeating high school.

You can imagine how much interest I had in my second tour. I didn’t need another high school diploma, so I had no reason to do any work or show up at school.

Mr. Thomas had given us a novel to read. It was about a Revolutionary War hero. Fiction. He had told us to write term papers about it. Odd, but this was a dream.

The paper was due the next day. I had done nothing whatsoever. I felt I had to do something by the next day in order to avoid failing. That was all I cared about. I was not interested in writing a good paper. I just didn’t want to be yelled at.

I was in the classroom with the other students, but Mr. Thomas was not there. He was late. I decided to take the time to use my laptop to see if I could learn anything about the guy in the book.

I searched the web very quickly. I made the mouse fly. I went to site after site. I made a lot of typing errors, so I went to sites that were not helpful. One site had something to do with sex. It showed a realistic cartoon lady who was wearing a short transparent nightgown with nothing underneath, and she was evidently familiar with a practice attributed to people from Brazil.

Somehow, my classmates were able to see what I was doing on a huge display. I told them I had gone to the dirty website by accident. In case they were wondering.

At my school, we had an unwritten rule, and the rule was that if a teacher was late, we could leave after a certain amount of time. I think it was 20 minutes. We got tired of waiting for Mr. Thomas.

A security guard came in. He was dressed more or less like a cop. He was a nice guy. A little nerdy. Glasses and a short beard. He wore an old-fashioned police hat.

We told him what was going on, and he told us to go home.

I was thrilled. Best news I could have asked for. I got up to leave.

My desk was like an elementary school desk in that it had a lid on hinges. It was bigger, of course. I opened it and saw that it was full of my belongings. I couldn’t take them home in one load.

By now, the guard had turned into a custodian. He wore a grey shirt with his name on the left breast pocket. Somehow I knew his name was Zeke. Ezekiel.

I asked Zeke if he or someone else would be around to let me into the room later to get my stuff. He said someone would be there.

I didn’t expect to return. I wondered if Mr. Thomas was dead. I guess he is, now.

When I woke up, I didn’t know whether the dream meant anything or not, so I prayed for revelation.

What is high school for? It prepares you for employment, and if you’re ambitious, it prepares you for self-exaltation in a prestigious, lucrative occupation. My school always sent a big percentage of students to Ivy League and Ivy-League-adjacent schools, and a lot of them went on to make big money.

In the dream, I had no ambition at all. Why would I? I didn’t need money, and the thought of getting a job and having to work was horrifying to me, as returning to prison would horrify an ex-con. This is my attitude in real life, as it should be. God has, with extraordinary generosity and patience, given me an easy life. Also, I know from past experience that no matter where I work, I will be blackballed, cheated, robbed, and undermined. Satan runs that world. It even happened to me at church. It’s part of Satan’s world.

The purpose of the dream was to get me thinking about ambition and to confirm that my attitude toward it was a gift from God.

I went to the Bible and the web to look around.

God expressly condemns ambition in many verses. I was relieved to see that.

Let’s start with Galatians 5. Look it up, and you will see that selfish ambition is a work of the flesh. The Greek word for it is eritheia.

Before you hit the keyboard and tell me that wanting to be a preacher or something similar is not a selfish ambition, let me point out that it very often is. Preaching is a great job. It can make you a millionaire, and you never have to do anything right. You can keep teaching things that don’t work, and when your victims complain that their lives aren’t getting better, you just tell them they’re not doing it right, or you say it’s an attack of the devil, and they will keep giving you money. This even works if you are caught in a motel room with a prostitute after getting another preacher removed from the pulpit for adultery.

Priests are often ambitious. Same for cardinals. Popes are often glory hounds; look at Francis. It’s not just a Protestant problem.

At Trinity Church in Miami, there was a young man called Chino. After I left Trinity and moved on to a church called New Dawn, Chino visited. He had decided to become a preacher.

He delivered a sermon which got people very stirred up. I thought it was pretty bad. Other people were cheering and clapping.

After the service, a friend of mine told me he had heard a preacher named Jabin Chavez recite the same sermon, nearly word-for-word.

Chino had been indoctrinated by a prosperity church run by a con artist with a family made up largely of con artists. He saw that the preacher lived in a mansion on Golden Beach with a yacht tied up out back. He saw a chance to get his own mansion, so he stole a sermon.

I only single Chino out because I don’t want to type dozens of similar stories, which I could easily do.

What does this have to do with sports? It should be obvious.

Sports are driven by ambition. They’re also driven by gambling, but on a personal level, they are driven by personal ambition.

In sick America, athletes get crazy favor. They get sex with all sorts of very attractive girls and women who won’t have anything to do with non-athletes. They get a grotesque amount of admiration. They get scholarships. They get good grades without doing their own work. They get all sorts of wealth. When they’re young, they get cars and paychecks for no-show jobs. They get bribes from colleges. They end up with free college degrees. Some become professionals and make tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. The police turn a blind eye to their violent crimes. It’s a cushy existence.

Don’t tell me there is no personal ambition in team sports. If you want your team to do well, great, but you wouldn’t be playing if it didn’t benefit you.

The word eritheia can be used to describe a lot of things. Selfish ambition. Strife. Rivalry. Factionalism. It has been used to describe people who campaign for political office. It describes doing a job purely for mercenary reasons.

Competitive sports promote all of these things. It’s about exalting yourself and abasing others. It’s about division. You or your team against the other guy or guys.

What happens at an athletic event? One person or team leaves in celebration, with memories that will bring them joy all the days of their lives. The other leaves in painful disgrace. Don’t let anyone tell you different. No one goes home thinking, “I played the game ethically. That makes me a winner.” That never happens.

Losers regret their losses all their lives. They fear losing. Many athletes throw up before competitions. Many beat their wives and girlfriends when they lose. They suffer depression. They are often condemned by teammates, relatives, coaches, and fans. These days, “goat” is used to mean “Greatest Of All Time,” but it originally meant an athlete who caused a loss.

If you win an Olympic gold medal, you may go on to extremely lucrative endorsements and appearances. If you win a silver, you end up teaching gym to high school students. Then you spend the rest of your life watching the gold medal people, wishing you weren’t a loser. Blaming yourself. Wondering what you could have done differently. Reliving moments when you made bad choices.

These principles apply to all types of competition. Shooting for a promotion your coworkers also want. Winning an election. Competing with another business. Ambition is divisive.

Don’t tell me we should apply these principles to Christianity, too, because Yeshua said he came to divide. Not true. Yeshua came to divide wrong-thinking people from the righteous. He didn’t come to pit the righteous against the righteous.

Romans 2 says God will render to every man according to his deeds:

To them who by patient continuance in well doing seek for glory and honour and immortality, eternal life:

But unto them that are contentious [eritheias], and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, indignation and wrath,

Tribulation and anguish, upon every soul of man that doeth evil, of the Jew first, and also of the Gentile

Second Corinthians 12:20:

For I fear, lest, when I come, I shall not find you such as I would, and that I shall be found unto you such as ye would not: lest there be debates, envyings, wraths, strifes [eritheiai], backbitings, whisperings, swellings, tumults

From the list of works of the flesh in Galatians 5:20:

Idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife [eritheia], seditions, heresies. . .

Philippians 1:16-17:

The one preach Christ of contention [eritheia], not sincerely, supposing to add affliction to my bonds:

But the other of love, knowing that I am set for the defence of the gospel.

Philippians 2:3-5:

Let nothing be done through strife [eritheia] or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves.

Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others.

Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus

If you want to see more references, click on this link to a reference site.

It all makes sense. What was the iniquity that got Lucifer expelled from heaven? Ambition. He wanted to compete with God, not because he thought God was wrong and wanted to save others from God, but because he wanted power and admiration.

Ambition is self-exaltation, and God hates self-exaltation. There are endless verses that show this. Here is one: “And whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted.”

To be ambitious is to keep yourself under a curse and make God himself fight you. If you’re a parent, it can destroy your descendants. My dad’s ambition helped destroy my sister, and it harmed me greatly.

Proper Christians don’t compete. They build each other up.

God has shown me how important it is to know your place and love it. I should be glad I get to submit to God. My wife should be glad wives have to submit to husbands. My son should be glad he has to submit to God and his parents.

There are people who have more than I do. Well, God bless them. They generally work hard, which I do not, and they provide all sorts of benefits. Inventions. Products. Helpful services. I wouldn’t trade places with Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos.

Much of the current strife in the world is based on ambition; the desire to elevate oneself above one’s proper place and take that which belongs rightly to others. The vicious people who set cities on fire and topple statues are motivated by ambition. They want what better people have, but they want to remain children and, at heart, murderers and criminals.

Ambition does great harm in the church. Ambitious Christians attack and take down Christians who want to do the right things and spread the truth. They amplify their own voices and smother the voices of better people.

The ambitious do the work of their father. They can wear robes and miters, and they can start big TV ministries and claim they brought millions of people to salvation, but they belong to Satan, and they do what he would do if he were in their shoes.

I’m very happy I had this dream. It means I’m doing better than I thought, and it will help me to avoid catastrophic decisions in the future. It will also help me protect my son from catastrophe when he is old enough to listen to me.

I hope this dream is about the rapture. I concern myself all the time with practical matters. How should I deal with wealth in order to make sure my wife and son always have more than enough? What should I do about various business affairs I loathe working on? What will I do about health insurance next year? Where can I find a good contractor to fix minor issues with the house? I hate this stuff. I would be great to be take out of this world with my brothers and sisters so I can let it all go, like the junk in the drawer in my dream.

Making the Effortless Impossible

I’ve been having an interesting day with my Chinese Alibaba-grade excavator, an AGT QK16R.

The last time I used it, I saw a long trail of oil behind it, and I realized this was not right, even for a Chinese machine. I parked it and fiddled with it. I thought the oil was coming from the slew motor. This is the motor that turns the excavator without moving the tracks.

Slew motor leaks are common with these machines because a lot of Chinese workers don’t believe in using wrenches. My motor is held in by 4 M8 cap bolts with lock washers. A lot of people find that these bolts are loose from the factory. This makes the motors wobble around.

There are also 4 bolts on the underside of the motor itself, and they have been known to leave the factory loose. My understanding is that when these bolts are loose, the O-ring in the motor gets torn up and causes a leak.

I found out the size of the O-ring: 138. Don’t take my word for it, because I haven’t installed one yet. I got some O-rings.

Today I got into the excavator. It is an amazing piece of machinery. I don’t mean that in a good way.

To get to the slew motor, you have to take off the floor plate. Easy, right?

I removed every bolt that held the floor on, and of course, all sorts of stuff was still in the way. The pedestal with the controls, mainly.

I learned some things that may help others.

1. Do not try to take off the lower sheet metal. AGT puts welded nuts on the upper sheet metal, where you don’t really need them, and it uses loose nylocks for the lower sheet metal. They are very, very hard to get at for loosening and tightening. Welding nuts to the inside of the excavator would be a good mod.

2. Removing the upper sheet metal is not hard, but it is tedious. You have to take out 8 screws and nuts, plus two bolts, to remove the door in front of the engine. The 8 screws are in hinges which don’t work because AGT made it impossible for the door to swing. A clever guy tapped the pins out of his hinges and replaced them with R-clips. I plan to do that, although Velcro would probably work just as well.

3. You should remove the foot pedal in order to get the floor off. It is held on by one oddly-chosen screw with a nylock.

4. You will have to remove the lower canopy support which is bolted to the frame. The bolts that hold it on go through the floor for no good reason. I am going to turn the holes into slots so I can loosen the bolts and lift the floor up instead of removing the support. The support is not needed to hold the canopy up, because the canopy bars in the rear are mounted solidly to the excavator frame.

5. One guy recommends cutting off the bit of the floor to the right of the control pedestal. It doesn’t really need to be connected to the rest of the floor. It can be reinstalled after cutting it. Some minor mods could be added to make everything stiffer.

6. Another guy recommends cutting the floor in two big pieces, front and rear.

7. When you get the engine door off, you get access to the front oil dipstick. This machine has two dipstick holes, front and rear, and AGT puts the dipstick in the front one where you have to take the excavator apart to get at it. The holes are interchangeable, so while the door is off, swap the plug at the rear of the engine for the dipstick in front. Now you can check your oil.

It turned out my slew motor was just fine, sort of. The bolts were not very tight, but the motor was not loose. I pulled the bolts out, applied Loctite, and reinstalled them. I don’t know the actual torque figure, so I went with a Chinese measure: yu wei tai nau.

I am going to pull it and check the bolts on the underside. I don’t want to put the excavator together and then have the motor fail.

The hydraulic fluid was coming from a valve thing (hydraulic swivel joint?) that feeds the track motors. When I looked at it, without even checking, I thought it looked weird. One one side, there were three screw-on fittings, and one was clearly farther from the motor than the others, suggesting it wasn’t tightened all the way. I fired the machine up, moved the tracks, and saw oil dripping out of the fitting.

Now I have to tighten that fitting. I wondered how I would do it, because access is nearly nonexistent. It’s under another fitting which I can reach, but I can’t get to the leaky fitting itself. I realized I could remove the top fitting, tighten the leaky one, and reinstall the top one, so that’s what I’ll do.

I checked whatever I could reach to make sure nothing else would come undone, but I can’t get at everything without a ton of work, so I plan to put the excavator together and hope for the best. I’m glad nothing was damaged.

The moral here is: tighten everything you can on your Chinese excavator. Also, change the hydraulic fluid before you run it, and don’t be afraid to modify it. You really are smarter than the engineers who designed it.

This info ought to be very helpful to people with the exact same excavator, and it should be somewhat helpful to people with similar models.

I Better not See a Bro Stache on Him This Year

I expected my son to grow up gradually, but it seems like he changes in sudden jumps.

Maybe 6 weeks ago, we got him a push walker because he was standing and holding onto furniture. We thought a walker would help him learn to walk. A push walker is sort of like a lawnmower. Babies stand behind them. They don’t sit in them.

He started standing and grabbing it right away, but he could not figure out how to move it around. He kept pulling it backward onto himself. He banged his head on it. I put padding on it to keep him from getting bruised.

He wasn’t able to push it around, but it has a panel with a bunch of toys on it, and he loved using those.

Last night, I was lying in bed looking at my phone, and I heard a noise. I looked down, and I saw his funny little head smiling up at me from beside the bed. He had pushed the walker across the room and into the bed.

I was amazed. It happened very suddenly.

He pushed it all over the bedroom last night. He loves it. It’s very easy for him. He holds the top bar with one hand and takes off. He acts like he has been doing it for months.

He will be walking in a week or so. I am sure of it. He has tons of strength, and he can stand up and squat without support. I’ve only seen him stand unsupported once, and it was only for a few seconds, but he is changing fast. What he’s doing with the walker is very close to walking.

We had to buy him a bunch of toys because we realized he was bored. He was chewing on charging cables and playing with anything we left within his reach. We got him a little plastic table with toys in it, and we also got him a plastic fire truck and a little toy TV remote that plays songs and so on.

He loves all of this stuff. He has learned how to use the table toys, and he spends a lot of time playing with them. There may be one toy he’s not using; I’m not sure. He sucks on the remote and pushes the buttons. He takes the parts out of fire truck and throws them around.

Now he has moved to a new stage, so we have to figure out what else to get him. I don’t even know what babies play with, so I am researching.

I don’t believe giving kids things spoils them. I believe teaching them not to appreciate things spoils them. It’s important to give kids anything they can make good use of. Where would we be if the great pianists hadn’t had good pianos when they were little more than toddlers?

My dad made good money, but my parents deprived me in comparison to the kids who lived around us. My sister and I had toys, but not many. I actually received hand-me-down toys from my best friend. I should have been given music lessons and good instruments as soon as I could benefit from them. My dad should have bought me equipment and taken me hunting and fishing. He and my mother should have shown me how to use science and engineering toys. I should have been taught to use tools. We should have traveled to Europe and Israel instead of taking cheap trips to Kentucky over and over.

It’s sad that I was encouraged to write. My parents and my teachers let me down with that advice. As a hobby and a way to communicate with people you care about, writing is fine, but anyone who encourages his child to do it for a living is extremely foolish. I should have been helped along with STEM pursuits. I would have had a bunch of patents by the time I was 30.

Toys aren’t luxuries. For kids, play is work. It’s their job. It builds capable adults.

We should also get something better than a stroller to use for walks. I don’t know anything about babies, so strollers were the only things that occurred to me when we had to move him around. There must be other things, like wagons. I’m looking into it.

We like taking mile-long walks on our private road, so we need something that will work well for that.

This boy is in such a hurry. We need to enjoy him the way he is while we can.

Bad Ideas go to the Burn Pile

Oh, boy. I feel like a runaway slave.

I managed to bust out and get some things done. Jobs that have been weighing on me and making me feel trapped.

I have lost a bunch of oil seals lately. Utility cart rear axle. Excavator slew motor. Tractor front axle. Even my car is leaking around the oil sensor.

I finally took my tractor’s axle apart and replaced a seal and two bearings. I have been thirsting for the day when I could use the tractor again, and it has come.

I am moving more rocks out of my yard. I have some buried rocks and boulders that get in the way of the mower, and I also have–had–a big flowerbed surrounded by irregular native rocks placed there by the guy who built the house. In addition to all this, he and his wife dumped more native rocks in random places as decorations. He put a bunch of them in places where there should have been grass. I couldn’t mow over them, and they sheltered weeds.

Some people think there is nothing nicer than a bunch of crude rocks surrounding a flowerbed or a walk. I disagree. Pavers and curbs always, always look better. They do a better job of containing things. They make regular borders between things. It’s easy to get close to them while mowing without hitting them. It’s easy to clean them up with a weedeater.

An oval of irregular rocks in your yard says, “I am cheap and lacking in good taste and common sense.”

A natural rock formation can look nice, but decorating your yard with obvious landscaping debris is tacky and doesn’t fool anyone.

Putting these rocks around the flowerbed was extremely unwise. It looked bad, and it caused lots of problems. We have a neighbor who has flowerbeds with pavers, and his yard looks spectacular.

Today I put the bucket on the tractor and rammed it into the rocks surrounding the big flowerbed, dislodging them so I could move them. Some went right into the bucket. Most, I had to put there myself. There were a few big ones weighing up to, perhaps, 150 pounds. There were dozens of smaller ones ranging from maybe 100 pounds to the size of a golf ball.

The big ones, I rolled into the bucket. The smaller ones, I picked up and threw. In maybe 90 minutes, I must have moved over a ton. I wanted to do more, but it was getting dark.

I’m so grateful to God for my energy. I am too lazy to do serious exercise, but I had no problem yanking rocks out of the ground and getting them into the bucket. I worked fast. My heart rate was elevated. I was sweating. I didn’t die or anything. I felt great.

I have prayed for God to keep me going so I can be here on Earth for my wife and son. I got so used to envying Christians who died and left this place, I think I started to welcome death. I apologized to God and repented. I don’t like Earth, but I am eager to sacrifice in order to be with my loved ones and help them.

I won’t pretend my motivation is completely altruistic. I want to be with them. I would hate to find myself leaving them prematurely. I want to see him grow up, and I want him to know me.

I think God has graciously agreed to help me, in spite of my wickedness and selfishness.

I told my wife to keep my son away from me for a couple of minutes so I could drink something and get it together, but he just ran in, stood up beside my chair, and started clawing at my shirt while screaming with joy. Then he speed-crawled away. Now he’s back.

He seems to have the same kind of energy I have. God’s joy, I believe.

She came and got him. I have to get up and join him in playing with his toys in a minute.

I’m sure there are still rocks out there. I’ll have to take a pitchfork and sift through the dirt to get rid of the ones I missed. After that, I’ll be able to mow over the flowerbed every week to kill weeds and puree the dead leaves.

I have hit rocks by the flowerbed with mowers several times. The rock border was formed so irregularly, I could not guess where it ended.

My theory is that the original owner and his wife told their kids, “Take the rocks we’ve found in the yard and pile them up around those two oaks by the driveway! It will be a fun project!” Then the kids moved a couple of huge rocks there, realized they wanted to be doing something else, and started using smaller and smaller rocks and arranging them with a sloppiness that increased with time.

Then the wife planted a magnolia between the oaks, which were about 7 feet apart, leaving me no choice but to rip it out after I moved here.

My wife and I have decided to make this place our own and abandon all reverence for the original owners’ ideas. I used to give them deference, thinking they had to know things I didn’t know, but over time, I have realized they made lots of dumb decisions I need to undo.

I plan to leave the flowerbed alone so grass covers it. It’s in the shade, in a place where oak leaves fall and kill things. It would take a ton of work to keep it up and make anything grow.

They also left a huge, sick oak in the middle of the driveway island. I had to cut that and get rid of it after it snapped 30 feet up. Next to it, there was a dense shrub about three feet high, encircling a scraggly dwarf magnolia that looked like it had tuberculosis. You don’t plant a tree inside a shrub. Is this not obvious?

A few weeks back, I tore out the shrub and the magnolia. Of course, there were also two ugly rocks, which I removed. I am thinking of making a proper flowerbed there with pavers around it. I’ll fill it with mulch and put some kind of attractive low-maintenance tree in the middle. Maybe a peach tree or a crape myrtle. Around here, the crape myrtle is the go-to answer to poor soil and hostile bugs and weeds. It’s not the greatest tree, but it thrives, and it doesn’t need much care.

No one should ever buy a dwarf magnolia. They always look like the tree Charlie Brown brought to school for the Christmas play.

I also had a magnolia about 15 inches from my expensive brick front walk. That was not a smart choice. You never put a tree close to a house unless you like buying new roofs, siding, pavement, and ceilings.

I murdered that magnolia, too, and I’m also going to murder the two rows of boxwoods that line the walk. Boxwoods always look like they’re dying, and you shouldn’t use shrubs to wall a walk in and get in the way.

I have other boxwoods, and they will die soon. I also killed some kind of scraggly tree beside the workshop. It got in the way when I mowed, and it looked awful.

I bought a flail mower, and I finally assembled it. I have a couple of things left to do to make it work better. Then the boxwoods will meet its spinning blades and become sawdust.

This property will never make Architectural Digest, but I should be able to make it presentable and arrange things so taking care of it doesn’t break my back.

I killed the original owner’s wife’s roses a long time ago. Roses always look terrible unless they receive perfect care and pruning, and they were in a bad location. I’ve killed many of her plants.

She put hideous, enormous bromeliads near the front door. I paid a friends’ kids to do some weeding, and they tore them out because they didn’t know what they were doing. That’s fine by me, because I think bromeliads look sort of evil.

I had a very satisfying time with the tractor. I can’t wait to see this place looking better.

Cut Out the Middleman While You Still Can

I feel like I was put on this earth to tell people to pray in tongues.

The benefits are so great they are beyond understanding, and the price of refusing can include things like loss of salvation and eternal damnation.

One of the things I love about praying in tongues is that it brings revelation. When I find myself praying in tongues for a very long period, I get excited, because I know God is about to teach me things.

If God isn’t teaching you things, you are likely to slide into beliefs and practices that will cost you salvation and put you at the mercy of evil people and spirits.

Hosea said:

My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee, that thou shalt be no priest to me: seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I will also forget thy children.

Hosea lived in a time when most people had to rely on scripture and special people who heard from God in order to receive knowledge, but that isn’t true today. By allowing the crucifixion, Yeshua made it possible for every believer to be filled with the Holy Spirit and hear directly from God. See what he said in John 16:

Nevertheless I tell you the truth; It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you.

John later informed us that the Holy Spirit, not men, was to be our teacher. Obviously, we have to hear from men to some degree, or most of us would never know anything about God. John was a man, and I am going to quote him. But men can’t be your primary source of knowledge, because they make mistakes and they also lie.

But the anointing which ye have received of him abideth in you, and ye need not that any man teach you: but as the same anointing teacheth you of all things, and is truth, and is no lie, and even as it hath taught you, ye shall abide in him.

And now, little children, abide in him; that, when he shall appear, we may have confidence, and not be ashamed before him at his coming.

This is interesting to me, because God told me that all authority comes from time spent with God, and all peace comes from authority.

Men who don’t hear the Holy Spirit hear every other spirit that shows up, and they repeat made-up doctrine that comes from those spirits. What can you say about these spirits? That they have no authority. If they contradict God, they contradict the highest authority.

To abide in God, as John tells us to do, we have to spend time with him. When you pray in tongues, you are spending time with God. As Paul says, when you speak in an unknown tongue, you speak to God, and he builds you up.

If you pray in tongues, you spend time with God. If you spend time with God, he teaches you from the position of complete authority. When you repeat what he tells you, you have authority and you are correct.

When you listen to men who don’t know God, you end up repeating unauthorized garbage that comes from demons. “Pray to dead people.” “The pope is infallible.” “Give money to me, and God will make you rich.” “You have to obey the dietary laws.” “God commands Christians to tithe.”

I have believed wrong doctrine propagated by preachers who listened to demons, but God has always shown me that they were wrong and helped me to escape the snares. I kept praying in tongues, and revelation came to me over time. As the word says, though I stumbled, I was not utterly cast down, because God upheld me with his hand.

The Holy Spirit was my compass. I was able to deviate from the course due to misinformation, but when I consulted the compass, I returned to the proper heading. When I got back on track, it wasn’t because I was smart. I was completely fooled before God corrected me. I thought Kenneth Copeland was a great preacher. I gave money to Robert Tilton.

I exchanged some emails with Robert Morris, because his teaching impressed me. How’s that for a confession? He has turned out to be a gigantic disappointment, not because he was sexually involved with a 12-year-old, although that’s not exactly inspiring, but because of the way he handled the consequences. He threatened the victim. He was even too greedy to pay her a modest amount of money, which is remarkable, considering his income.

He wrote, “My attorney advises that if I pay you any money under a threat of exposure, you could be criminally prosecuted and Debbie and I do not want that.”

Those are shameless lies. You can’t be prosecuted for extortion if the victim doesn’t press charges.

He is currently suing his church for millions. He wants over one million up front. Then he expects $800,000 per year until he hits 70, and after that, $600,000 per year as long as he or his wife lives. If he is suing for that kind of money, he was making similar money, or better, before the scandal broke.

That’s $4.8 million for the first 6 years, and assuming one spouse makes it to 84, $9 million more. Add the initial payout, and you get something like $15 million. He expects this from the church he built but also crippled.

The victim asked for $50,000, so what was that to the Morrises? Two weeks’ pay?

Was he ever the real thing, or did he steal his material from other people and make money from it? Does absolutely every charismatic preacher have to turn out to be a heartless, avaricious crook?

Ambition is the enemy of the Holy Spirit. It seems like every famous preacher is ambitious.

I don’t see him winning his case. The church claims there is a morality clause in his contract, and a jury is not likely to want to help him.

If I had sat around listening to men and never questioning them, I would be in big trouble today. I might be a Catholic. I might still be a prosperity Christian. I might be an atheist.

One of the sad things about my experience is that some of the worst preachers who taught me lies were baptized with the Holy Spirit and had the ability to pray in tongues. They just didn’t exercise it. They were trying to impress God. They were too busy for God! Can’t talk now, God! I have to build a bigger church! I have to go look at a jet!

They had time to network and copy sermons, but they didn’t have time to pray in tongues, be with the person who loves them more than anyone else ever will, and listen.

I have no doubt that you can be baptized with the Spirit, be given the ability to pray in tongues, and then go to hell. You can always go to hell if you want to, regardless of whether you accepted salvation in the past.

If God leads you to water, you better drink if you want to live. God has called the world “a dry and thirsty land where no water is.”

This morning I was praying in tongues, and I started thinking about the filthiness of my life and things I still needed to clean up. As long as you’re not like Yeshua, there is cleaning to be done.

I thought about all the sleazy, disgusting things I had done and said in the past. I think I would rather be flogged every day for a month than have the whole world watch my life on a screen.

Things are much, much better than they used to be. I used to be fatherless, so I acted like a fatherless kid, disgracing myself daily. Now I am improving. I disgrace myself less frequently.

I keep asking God to raise my wife and me all over again, and he is doing it. I’m not good, but at least I’m not what I was, and I will keep getting better.

I was given a great revelation yesterday. A long time ago, God told me all my problems were caused by lack of prayer. Yesterday, he showed me the other way of looking at it: all my problems can be solved by prayer. That’s a big motivator.

I had a revelation this morning, and here it is: if God won’t let me have something in heaven, why would I want to have it on Earth?

Example: if God won’t let me watch a movie in heaven, why would I show it in my living room?

An awful lot of things fit that description. I still have some movie DVD’s somewhere. I am going to dig them up and throw them away. I’m not sure I should dump The Ten Commandments, but I probably will. I will dump Casablanca, which is my favorite movie.

The entertainment industry was created to destroy me and my children, so why cooperate with it?

I should throw out some books. I’m not sure what I have left that could cause problems.

When I was young, I read books by fools like Henry Miller, Anais Nin, Ernest Hemingway, and Fritz Perls. Real excrement. Did me a lot of harm. Those people are all in hell. I loved Hunter Thompson. He’s in hell, too, and he has dragged a lot of intelligent people down with his wake. He was a monumental buffoon.

People think only children need to be protected from bad influences. If that’s true, why are adults joining Antifa and trying to hurt the police? Why are there conservative Christian adults who don’t support Israel and who think Jews cause all the world’s problems?

It’s not true at all. If adults weren’t impressionable, there would be no advertising industry and no campaign consultants.

If I had started praying in tongues at 5, I would not have been damaged by filthy books and entertainment or by bad preachers. There was no one to teach me, however. They were too busy telling us to worship the pope or whatever.

My own mother, who was not Catholic, taught me to pray to Saint Anthony when I needed help finding things, and I did it. I hope Saint Anthony was saved, but I know he can’t hear anyone’s prayers.

If people had paid any attention to the Holy Spirit throughout history, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel wouldn’t be covered with paintings of naked people. If you think about it, it’s insane that anyone ever thought that was a good idea.

Imagine going to Yeshua today and saying, “We’re building a new sanctuary for you, and we’re planning on covering the ceiling with paintings of naked people.”

How do you think that would go over with him?

I wonder how many Catholics enjoyed that ceiling for the wrong reasons back in the days before pornography. I wonder how many sodomites enjoyed the paintings of men. People who remained in perversion because their church didn’t know how to deliver them. Like a huge percentage of current priests and cardinals.

If you like naked art in churches, enjoy it now, because God will eventually destroy it.

I believe God would now tell you this: “As you turn away from earthly culture, turn to me.” Don’t just give things up. Pick up better things.

I hope this is helpful and that you use it successfully to avoid my mistakes.

Local Smith Prices Herself Out of Business

I am wiped out from installing a new dishwasher. It should have been pretty fast, but like most quick, easy jobs, it had complications.

I bought a Bosch dishwasher to replace a Bosch dishwasher in the same series, and of course, Bosch changed the inlet fitting and did not include a threaded elbow to connect to it. I went to the local Ace, and unfortunately, the person who helped me was a friendly and earnest young man who hasn’t learned everything about the hardware business yet.

We could not find the elbow, which was confusing to me because I knew it had to be a common part. Bosch equals Thermador equals Whirlpool and so on these days. He sent me home with a couple of parts to screw together as a substitute, and I had to locate the correct part on the web, go back to Ace, and show them the SKU.

I did an excellent job of installing it because a) I am capable of doing simple things well, and b) I actually care about the quality of my work, which may not have been the case with the guys Lowe’s wanted to send for $217.

I may want to adjust the dishwasher’s position in the sagittal plane by 3/32″ or so, but that can wait.

If you need a dishwasher right now, jump on one of these Bosches while they’re on sale.

I’m still waiting for something else I ordered. You will never guess. Yes, it’s a rifle.

Four or 5 years back, I bought a Thompson Center Venture bolt action rifle in .204 Ruger. I thought I was going to shoot a lot of varmints. So far, that has not been the case. I also hoped to use it for target shooting to improve my shooting without spending money on pricier ammo.

Until just now, I thought it was a Venture Predator, but it turns out it’s just a Venture. I believe “Predator” means “with a green plastic stock.”

We live in amazing times. Fifty years ago, which was the 1970’s, believe it or not old people, a rifle that shot maybe 5 minutes of angle (about 5.25″ at 100 yards) was considered very accurate. Now, any bolt rifle that doesn’t shoot 1.5 MOA is considered lame, and you can walk into any sporting goods store and choose from a selection of 1-MOA rifles.

I chose the Thompson Center partly because it came with a 1-MOA guarantee. Three shots at 100 yards. Based on photos of targets I shot back then with cheap Fiocchi ammo, it looks like the gun came through, although I also shot some bad groups. That guarantee was pretty clever, because any gun will eventually shoot one three-shot 1-MOA group if you keep trying.

I wasn’t ecstatic about the trigger, so I looked for options, and there were none. Sadly, TC was not doing well, and its guns were not all that popular. In fact, it was going out of business, even though it belonged to Smith & Wesson. I don’t recall how that worked.

TC has been bought by the guy who sold it to S&W, but I don’t think they’ve actually made any new guns. Will they ever start? Who knows?

If you buy a popular gun like a Remington or Tikka, you will be able to find a lot of aftermarket triggers for it. I suppose no trigger maker thought it was a good idea to spend time and money on a trigger for an unpopular gun, however.

I put a lighter spring on it, and that was about all I could do.

Flash forward to a year or two ago. Suddenly I had a silencer. I wanted to get back to shooting. But two bolt guns I wanted to shoot did not have threaded barrels: the TC and a Tikka T3x.

By the way, the Tikka IS a 1-MOA gun, with factory ammo and no excuses. I managed to shoot a few rounds to zero it. It seems like it always rained when I started shooting for accuracy, so I have had a lot of sessions cut short. Anyway, even the zeroing shots, made while I was turning scope screws, looked very good.

I’ll post photo of a target I shot with “garbage” Sellier & Bellot ammo. This is a modestly-priced deer rifle on a modestly-priced bipod, shooting cheap ammunition. I shot these rounds while still adjusting the scope. There is one flyer which was probably caused by me shooting one round and then cranking the screws, and then there are at least 6 rounds that are 1 MOA or extremely close to it.

Checking my blog history, I see that I went indoors because I wanted to see if the scope was loose, not because of rain. When I shot another target with different ammo, the point of impact changed in a way that didn’t make sense to me. And target above was shot at both 50 and 100 yards. I shot one round at 50. It was very low. I adjusted the scope and shot two rounds into the same hole. Then I backed up to 100 and shot pretty much into the same POI. I was confused, because the 50-yard POI was essentially the same as the 100-yard POI. I didn’t understand how flat the gun shot at these distances.

That S&B FMJ 6.5 Creedmoor is nothing to sneeze at, at least at 100 yards. I bought a ton of it. It shoots great in the Tikka and also in my RPR.

If the domestic enemies of Christ finally started their war and I somehow found myself in a situation where I had no choice but to go out with the militia nuts and fend off guerrilla murder squads in floral print dresses, I would be able to do what was necessary over and over while they were too far away to see me without binoculars.

I think I paid $16.00 per box when I bought them one at a time, and I didn’t buy most of mine one at a time.

Of course, I have zero interest in participating in a civil war. If it weren’t for my family, I think I would prefer being among the early casualties than staying here and treating demonized jerks like paper targets. The word says David was a bloody man. I have no desire to follow suit. I would rather be a man of love.

So anyway, I had the Tikka and the TC, and they were not threaded.

I looked into having them threaded. In spite of living in a huge 2A area, I could not find anyone close to me who would do it, and I really did not want to do it myself. Most machining is easy, but barrels are not made to fit in the usual lathe tooling, and they are hard to remove from actions. Also, it’s easy to mar them up, and aligning them in lathes so the bullets won’t hit the silencers later is more complex than you would think.

I found someone in the next county, and she wanted $195-$275, which is insane. I paid $450 for the TC.

I let it go, but recently I learned something that changed the picture. Silencer Central now offers mail-in threading for $165, including muzzle protectors. The price is lower if you ship two barrels at once. The shipping is about $40 whether you send one or two.

Great. I am sold. It’s fantastic news. I’m sending the Tikka in, because even though it is not a high-priced rifle, it is 100% worth it. But the Thompson Center?

I can’t get a trigger for it. I don’t know if I’ll ever get fun-level accuracy out of it. Thompson Center has been bought and reanimated, but there is no guarantee they will provide warranty service or that they’ll exist next year.

It looks like a quagmire to me.

I figure I can sell it for $350, so that’s $350 I can put toward something else. That something else is a Ruger American Predator in the same caliber. I want the same caliber because I have a boatload of ammunition, and I still think the .204 Ruger has potential.

It has a light, fluted barrel. The metal bits are Cerakoted. It’s threaded. It has a pretty good trigger out of the box. There are lots of aftermarket parts for it, including Timney triggers. It will probably shoot 1 MOA the day I bring it home. Lots of guys are getting that kind of performance in other calibers.

I’m sold. I don’t need any more hassle.

I’m getting the rifle plus a Timney. I’ll take the scope off my TC and put it on the Ruger. Done deal.

Now I have to ask: is it really necessary for two different companies to put “Predator” in the names of their guns? It sounds kind of silly. AMERICAN HE-MAN HAIRY-CHESTED CARNIVORE PREDATOR!

Yes, I am a predator. I have killed more fish than red tide, and I have managed to make a tiny dent in the hunting realm by murdering squirrels. And I eat hamburgers. But come on. You can call the gun something a little less steroidy-sounding, and I will still buy it. I mean, I did.

It bugs me that people call the Tikka, the Ruger, and the TC budget guns. Why do they do that? I guess you get more refinement in guns costing two or three times as much, and you get walnut instead of plastic, but I feel like any quality gun should be respected. If a gun can hit rats repeatedly at 100 yards, it is durable, and it is pleasant to shoot, calling it a budget gun sounds a little snobby.

I think the Tikka ran me $950 or so. Budget? Really?

The TC may not be long for my armory, but it seems very well made to me. All the machining is neat and tidy. It’s actually pretty tight because of the tolerances.

I don’t know if I’ll stick with .204 Ruger. It’s kind of a novelty round. I like it because it’s modern, with modern ballistics something like .223 can’t match, but on the other hand, .223 is more powerful, and it can hit anything I am likely to shoot at. It’s just as accurate, even if it doesn’t shoot as flat. I could blow through my .204 ammo and then rebarrel.

I have another .204 rifle besides the TC, so putting a .223 barrel on the TC would not deprive me of the ability to shoot .204 well even if I sold the TC.

Maybe I shouldn’t have bought the new rifle. It just bugged me that the TC had so many issues.

It should be here soon. I hope I actually use it.

Comforting Art From a Long-Lost Place

I have two exciting deliveries coming today. A new dishwasher and a less-than-mediocre art print.

My Bosch dishwasher left production in 2016, if the web’s guess is correct. I have had it for 9 years, and it may have been here almost 6 years when I arrived. A web source thinks it became available at around the start of 2012.

My dishwasher is not smart. I can’t communicate with it at all. No app. No wifi. No Bluetooth. But it did function for somewhere between 9 and 15 years with only a moderate amount of trouble.

I had to replace the front door panel containing the handle once. There is no latch. You just pull until it gives up. The part you pull on is around 3/16″ thick on each side, plastic, with no reinforcement. It eventually gave way because it was stupidly designed, and I had to spend about $80 on a new panel.

I got some special JB Weld for plastics, and before I installed the new panel, I shot the problem areas full. Now it has the strongest Bosch dishwasher door handle on Earth.

It also leaked a couple of times. I could not figure out why. I was going to tear into it, and then the leaking stopped.

It leaked again recently, and it refused to repair itself, so I took to AI to figure out what was wrong. I had to keep correcting Grok, and eventually it led me to a couple of likely parts. One cost $20, so I ordered it and replaced it.

Installing it should have been an easy job, but I had to lie on the floor on my face and turn a hex fitting 1/16 of a turn at a time, and there were other issues. Bosch could have made it much easier by using some brains. The order of installation operations caused the problem. It’s much easier to remove the hose from the part if the part is out, but you have to remove the hose in order to take the part out. That kind of thing. Stupid.

It still leaked, so I looked into the other part. It was a pump, it was discontinued, it would have cost something like $250 if I had been able to find it, and replacing it would have been a very unpleasant job. I would have had to turn the dishwasher upside down, and there was no guarantee the new part would fix the issue.

I could have called a repairman and blown a hundred bucks or so to be told I was wrong, but I was almost certainly right, and other parts would have been replaced, so I would have been out maybe $200 at the least, and I would have still had an old machine with a vanishing parts supply.

I found a successor model on sale at Lowe’s for $400 off for no clear reason, so I jumped on that. They wanted $217 for installation, which I did not jump on. It’s two screws, two tubes, and a cord. I need to open a dishwasher installation business and charge $150 per trip.

I went with Bosch in spite of the stupid bits. Basically, the machine has impressed me. It worked well, and working on it was surprisingly easy for the most part. And the parts are not terribly expensive. It looks like they gave it parts support for a reasonable amount of time. Could have been better, but I have seen worse. And getting over 40% off the price was a deal I could not miss out on.

Oh, boy. Here comes the truck.

I’m paying them $50 to haul off the old machine. I could do that myself, but in a time when a visit to Cracker Barrel costs over $30, $50 seems cheap for what I’m getting.

It’s here. Life can now go on. We can cook again.

I know I’m spoiled, but if the dishwasher quits, it means I can’t cook. It doesn’t mean I can cook and wash dishes by hand. No.

My other package is a Nellie Meadows print.

Nellie Meadows was an artist from Clay City, Kentucky. My grandfather owned a lot of land in her area. Was she a great artist? No. Was she a good artist? Mmmm…no. Let’s be honest. I would say that she was not quite good enough to make it as a commercial artist drawing new Buicks for newspaper ads. She misunderstood perspective and composition, and she chose subjects poorly.

On the other hand, her work was very popular with people in the area because she, along with a guy named Al Cornett, was a scarce commodity. They were the only artists within miles.

Al’s work is better but still not good.

Actually, man who made quasi-pornographic sculptures lived about 50 yards from my grandparents, and his work is in the Smithsonian. His name was Edgar Tolson. I wouldn’t want any of that stuff in my house.

He carved anatomically-correct figures of Adam and Eve in the buff. He also did carvings that lacked genitalia. I guess it would be okay to have one of those. Antiques Roadshow appraised one of his pieces for $2,000-$3,000, so he’s not up there with Picasso.

I think the fuss over Tolson’s work is sort of like the reverse racism of soft expectations, applied to white people. If he had lived in New York, his work would all be in landfills.

My grandparents had some Nellie Meadows and Al Cornett prints in their house, and I didn’t get any of them when they died. My sister glommed at least one Cornett print and utterly destroyed it. I had never seen an art print stained with black mold until she got ahold of it. I would guess my aunt glommed the others while glomming things for her kids without going through the will or probate or my grandparents’ wishes. But I’m not sure.

My grandparents had a painting called “Kentucky the Great State;” a title which was not intended to be sarcastic. It wasn’t good, but I used to sleep in the bedroom where it hung, so I want a copy.

I have Ebay set up to send me Nellie Meadows and Al Cornett items, and it sent me a listing for a painting of Natural Bridge. This is a bridge created by erosion, and it is located in the Red River Gorge, near my grandparents’ town.

It’s one of her better works, meaning it’s good enough for a post card. It has what looks to be a wormy chestnut frame. It wasn’t expensive. I got the seller down to $42 plus shipping. I took it.

We plan to clean it up and put it in one of the upstairs bedrooms. It’s good enough for kids and guests. I already have one of her paintings in the guest toilet.

I have given up on Eastern Kentucky as a place to live or visit. The culture is just not up to par. The childishness, racism, violence, machismo, drunkenness, ignorance, spousal abuse, and so on are too much for me to deal with, and I would also find it awkward to live near my relatives who have pretty much rejected me in favor of bits of my grandparents’ estates. I’m also bummed out because so many people there are conservative in their hearts yet vote for Democrats so the government will give them money.

Nonetheless, I have very fond memories of Kentucky, and I often think about what it could be if the people would just grow up.

I hope the painting is in good shape when it arrives. Now I have to install a dishwasher.

The new dishwasher is “smart.” Notice the quotation marks. Bosch expects me to use an app to set it up and use it. I can do it without the app, but then I lose elite features. I won’t be able to set a delayed start, and I won’t be able to change the dishwasher’s gender.

I’ll bet that smart junk added $75 to the MSRP.

I wonder when we’ll get over the smart idiocy and resume making appliances that make sense.

Anyway, here’s to our mechanical and electronic slaves. Thank you, God, because I don’t have to wash clothes or dishes by hand, travel on foot or on a cart, take cold showers, or accept the climate nature gave me. I appreciate it more than I can say.

Daddy is Pleased

I saw a lovely video from Mike “Mike with the Mic” McCarthy today. He’s a brave soul who goes to public places in Australia and holds signs with “JESUS” and related verbiage on them.

Australia is not a friendly place for Christians now. Christianity is in sharp decline, with a minority now identifying as Christian. Perversion is one of the main drivers of the decline.

As God predicted to me, and I repeated, many years ago, homosexuality has turned out to be the club Satan uses to beat Christians.

I don’t know a lot about McCarthy, but his videos show him being abused by various people, ranging from atheists to homosexuals to, oddly, Maoris. Maoris are from New Zealand, which is almost a thousand miles from Australia at the closest point.

As far as I can tell, McCarthy does not yell at people or provoke them in any way.

The cops show up over and over and tell him he’s the problem. In one amusing video, they tell him he’s obstructing pedestrian traffic as dozens of pedestrians walk past unimpeded.

I wanted to repost a video in which a trans lunatic approaches him for no reason and starts screaming irrationally.

Of course, I use the word “trans” as a convenience. There are no transgender or transsexual people. There are only the demonized, the confused, and the attention-starved.

And there are real Trans, from Vietnam.

On a related not, the percentage of American college students identifying as trans has dropped by something like 40% since 2025, which means a lot of young women had their healthy breasts sliced off and burned as waste, and also had themselves skinned to manufacture false penises, in order to get attention and admiration.

What do you do now that your arm and leg are covered with skin grafts, your breasts are gone, and your genitals are ruined? There is no reset button for that.

It would take a very, very unusual type of man to fall in love with a girl like that and marry her. It is beyond sad.

“Trans” men are more likely to keep their bodies intact, because many joined the movement in order to gain access to women’s private areas so they could enjoy voyeurism and rape.

Here is the video:

Clearly, this man does not dress or act like a woman. His speech is a little effeminate, but that’s about it. And he is utterly deranged. He raves about the Christian lady holding the camera raping elders in their sleep, whatever that means. He says, “We’re not your fuzzy angels!” He says, “I’m married to daddy.”

Watch the whole thing.

This is demon-possessed behavior at its peak. Consuming rage. Complete detachment from reality.

What does “I’m married to daddy” mean? Is daddy the main demon who inhabits him?

These are the people who are going to come for us. This is the kind of person who shot Donald Trump, Cory Imperatore, David Dutch, and Charlie Kirk. Candace Owens is on her way to becoming such a person.

The man in the video shows what happens as people approach the final stages of demon control. It’s a progressive thing, pun not intended but appropriate.

The trans business is a tool Satan uses to separate people from reason. It’s like the little thin tool you slip under the case of your phone when you take it apart to replace the battery. The process starts with a tiny crack, and then your mind is opened up like a trash chute door, allowing no end of filth and derangement to enter.

Be watchful of your trans acquaintances, along with all the TDS sufferers you know. They may be relatively peaceful now, but they are sleepers who will one day be mustered against you.

I thank God they have been so slow to embrace firearms. But that’s coming, as Tyler Robinson, the actual and sole Charlie Kirk shooter, proves. He and Audrey Hale and the rest.

Welcome Back to 1930

Am I living in a movie? Is that what’s happening? Does that explain all the astonishing and surreal events I’m witnessing?

I’ll embed a video below, featuring Candace Owens cursing Israel. She curses everyone who took part in this defensive war and in the establishment of the ceasefire.

I’ll transcribe her demonic vomit in case the video disappears. I will add some language that isn’t heard in this particular version of the video.

Trump wants a Nobel Peace Prize, by the way, for the planned ethnic cleansing, that they could profit on the land and turn it into a beach town.

This is our “Never again,” okay?

This is a holocaust. The holocaust just happened. A real holocaust just happened. We will never forget this. You can tell your children what happened in Gaza. You can tell them exactly who did it. Exactly whose families were involved in this.

Their children will be cursed. Okay? You go and you play in the sand where you know that your forefathers planned to mass-murder children; you will be cursed. Every person who steps foot on that. Every family that is set to inherit what they did. They wil be cursed.

Unbelievably, she goes on to quote the Koran, an accursed book sponsored by Satan.

Here is an except from the Koran about Jesus, who is speaking as a baby to defend Mary’s honor, said, “I am the servant of God. He has given me the scripture and made me a prophet, and he has made me blessed wherever I am. God is my Lord and your Lord, so worship him.”

She was reading a message from a Muslim fan, of whom she has many now. She went on to ramble about Charlie Kirk and Catholicism.

A real Christian who knows the Holy Spirit would have said, “The Koran is not scripture, and Yeshua says he is the only way to the father. Yeshua said he existed before Abraham, and that he and God were one.” But the person who sent the quotation had also sent her money, and she kept right on going without trying to dispel his fatal delusions.

The part about “planned ethnic cleansing” is a disturbing yet typical piece of cognitive dissonance. Trump and Netanyahu planned this war? They arranged the October 7th rapes, murders, castrations, and kidnappings? How did they get Gazans to play along?

Trump pulled that miracle off so he and some Jews straight off of Nazi propaganda posters could build beachfront hotels? Seriously?

Jews don’t like the word “holocaust” because it means “sacrifice.” I suppose they don’t want to be seen as burnt offerings. They prefer “shoah,” which means “catastrophe.” I use “holocaust” because most people recognize the term, and most have no idea what “shoah” means.

I guess the Jews who were burned by the Nazis truly were burnt offerings. They were offerings to Satan, the God of Nazism. The God of Candace Owens. Anyway, I use “holocaust” for convenience.

Owens is now claiming that a justified and measured response by a perennially-victimized nation was “genocide,” even though most of the population of Gaza is just fine and the death toll figures we are hearing come from savages and liars with a proven track record of worthlessness.

The language she used about Israel and the people in the Trump admnistration who arranged the ceasefire is classic Satan. Usurp. Project. Call evil good and good evil.

If you want to know what Satan is like, read what his children say about Christians and Jews, and you’ll have a pretty good idea. Read what pagans who hate Yeshua say about God. Satan takes every truth about himself and spews it back as a lie at God, the Jews, and God’s children.

Projection is a form of insanity. It can be severe, in that a person always projects, or it can be a lesser disorder, in which a person projects selectively. My dad and my sister both had it. I think it’s caused by demons, because it’s straight out of Satan’s playbook, and it doesn’t make much sense when you try to explain it supernaturally. If I have faults and do evil, why would I think other people had the faults and did the evil?

If you want to know my sister well, get her going about me and listen to what she says. Then apply it to her. The same principle applies to Jews and their demonized enemies.

I think the best projective canard is this: “Jews cause all the problems.” That is possibly the most absurd thing ever to pass between human lips. It’s amazing God doesn’t set people on fire when they say it.

Holocaust and genocide. This is what happened to the Jews, not the savages in Gaza. The ancestors of today’s Gazans were trying to exterminate the Jews while Hitler was still a small-time crank in Austria and Germany. Gazans chant about the destruction of the Jews. They create children’s shows featuring small children pretending to murder Jews. They murder Jews all the time, and when they do, they’re proud of it. They call their parents and show them the bodies, and their parents rejoice.

See that toy in the second photo? The one with the blue legs? My son has that toy. I put it together for him yesterday, and we spent a lot of time playing with it. Imagine your baby’s toys in that room.

Curses. This is what will happen to Candace Owens, Gazans, and those who side with them. God loves the Jews even though most are in rebellion (the same could be said of Christians). He has not given up on them. If there are curses facing them, it’s because they have been stubborn with God. It is certainly not because they took reasonable steps to prevent their own extinction.

Real Christians know that those who bless Israel will be blessed, and those who curse Israel will be cursed.

Owens is cursing her own children.

Never again. This is what Jews say about the first holocaust (the prophets predict another one). It means Jews will do what it takes to make sure it will never happen again.

It makes no sense to apply this to Gazans, since they continually provoke conflict with unnecessary and appalling genocidal attacks. All the Gazans have to do to make themselves safe is to stop trying to mass-murder Jews and get rid of Israel, a nation established by God.

It’s amazing how demons have transformed Owens. Hate animates her, like an electric current animating a fresh corpse. She squirms in her chair, shows her teeth, and narrows her eyes while striving to come up with words that adequately express her deranged rage.

I always say female demoniacs have “crazy eyes.” You’ve seen this condition in people like Jasmine Crockett and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Now Candace Owens has it.

She claims she’s doing her libeling for God and the papist church, but how can that be true? She and her husband are close friends with Andrew Tate, a Muslim pimp and pornography creator. She has had Tate as a guest on her podcast, and she defends him. How do you rationalize that?

A Christian should be good to the lost, when possible. He should not have close friends who reject Yeshua, and he definitely should not be close to Muslim pimps who create and sell pornography. We are not to be unequally yoked.

Yes, Yeshua talked to drunks and prostitutes. He spoke to them as a leader, not a follower or a partner. Try and imagine him packing the Tate brothers around Israel. The very notion is asinine.

I keep telling my wife it’s like there is a disaster movie, and instead of watching it on a screen, we’re inside it. Things are happening that could not have happened even 10 years ago. They would not have been permitted by the American public.

There will be a second Jewish holocaust. I am sorry to say it, but the truth is the truth. Ezekiel, Isaiah, and Zechariah predict it. They weren’t talking about ancient events. They weren’t talking about Hitler. They were talking about the latter days. When I watch Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, and their mouth-foaming followers, I know in my heart, not just my mind, that it can happen here, and it is. It’s already in the works.

I used to say Jews should move to Israel in order to avoid slaughter. Now I don’t think that will help. The word says the next holocaust will take place in Israel. Should they stay in America? I don’t think that will help, either. The next holocaust will be global, leaving only a remnant.

The only safety is in closeness to Yeshua, who will pull his children out before the tribulation gets going. This is not an option that attracts a lot of Jews.

Check out these fawning comments from Owens fans who think they’re Christians.

Alright guys,
a MOMENT OF SILENCE FOR CANDACE OWENS. Let us pray that GOD protects her of any and all evil coming up against her or that will try and destroy her good work. It’s very important that those reading this say a prayer for her. ??
We need Candace to continue doing her good work ?

Enjoy your vacation! Christ is King.

You are doing the Lord’s work. Thank you

I saw a report that evangelicals are multiplying in France. It’s supposed to be encouraging. It’s not. “Evangelical” covers all sorts of people who are demonized and on board with Owens. The only people who are saved from derangement are CHARISMATICS who spend time with the Holy Spirit every day.

It’s not enough to claim you’re charismatic. Charismatics go to hell in droves. You have to be charismatic and also spend time with God.

People claiming to be evangelicals will kill Jews, and they will also kill people like me if they can.

I can’t imagine how much God hates the sea of lies we now swim in. The truth got lost, lies took over, and what did Satan’s children do? They complained about the truth being lost and lies taking over, except they went after the people who told the truth, and they told the lies. Owens could fill the Pacific with lies all by herself. Eventually, many innocent people will die because of her lies.

Get ready for murder in the streets. The apocalypse is here. The only question is how quickly things will progress.

Regretfully, I Must Pass on the Queers for Palestine Silent Auction

Today is this family’s day of rest and prayer. No laundry, no mowing, no welding, no painting, no repairs, no business.

We expect to do what we always do on Sunday: eat at Costco. I often wonder what my high school classmates would think of that. At least two were the children of a billionaire, and many were snobs. I really look forward to those cheap pizza slices and free-refill beverages, eaten on fiberglass picnic-style tables.

I have no interest in seeing any of my classmates again. Maybe one guy, but that’s it. When I knew them, they were unhappy worldly people with poor values.

I dreamed of one of them last night. John. We were in high school together. I would say we were friends, but we weren’t. Sometimes you spend a lot of time with a person and consider him a friend, and then after you part ways, you realize you just kept company for the sake of having company.

John isn’t an awful person, but he is insecure and competitive. He is selfish. He is extremely rigid. He has never thought for himself. Whatever the herd says is right is right. He finds people who reject the herd amusing, and he feels he is better than they are. Sometimes they make him angry, just because they’re different.

I don’t think he has changed. Maybe he has. I ran into a store maybe 10 years ago, and he seemed about the same. Personable, but condescending.

I cut back on hanging around with him because I realized he was condescending and didn’t treat me as an equal. Also, he stole a girl from me, which is a huge violation of the male friendship code.

The desire for a gradual parting was probably mutual. I don’t think he liked me all that much.

In high school, friendship is like looking for a seat in the lunchroom. You go where you’re accepted, and you take the good with the bad.

I couldn’t help John in his ambitions, so I don’t think he had much motivation to be my friend.

We didn’t have much in common. I had all sorts of interests. He was just an inside-the-box guy who wanted to watch sports, go to law school, practice law, and make money. If you know John, he isn’t inviting you to his house to see his paintings. He’s not climbing mountains in Nepal. He’s not composing music or fly fishing. He probably owns less than 10 tools.

I should have dropped him sooner, but I was too much of a person-pleaser. I think I’ve gotten over that! Most people who know me would surely agree.

In the dream, I was living in the house I lived in during high school. John came to the front door, dressed in his lawyer attire minus the jacket. He wanted to show me his car, which was parked by the curb behind him.

He said it was a Charger. It was very special. It had a thousand horsepower. He wanted me to see it.

When I walked out to see it, it was across the street. I had to walk a long way. I wondered why he had moved it. It was inconsiderate.

The car became a very fancy bicycle. It had big balloon tires, and at first, it had some kind of propulsion. The tires were not attached to the bike. They had no spokes. Somehow they stayed in place and spun anyway.

He started riding through a grassy field while telling me about the bike. He never offered to let me ride it. That was like the real John. I had to jog beside him.

I said there was no way it had a thousand horsepower.

For some reason, after a while, he had to pedal, so I guess it turned into a regular bike.

My high school was about half Jewish, and some of the Jewish guys were very competitive. Most were not competitive at all. If you befriended one of the competitive ones, you couldn’t be on the same level. You had to be above or below. John was like that. They said a lot of resentful things about other Jewish guys whose families had more money. There was a lot of competition when it came to bar mitzvah gifts.

I had another competitive friend. Ken. He tried to make valedictorian, but he was caught cheating. Got into Princeton anyway. He switched to the University of Florida because they had a short program that would give him a BS and an MD in a hurry.

Ken was miserable. One of the other Jewish kids came from a family worth hundreds of millions, and he used to tell Ken he would never be worth as much as he was. It bothered him. Ken’s father died, and Ken said his father was laughing at him from the afterlife because he would never be as successful as he had been.

Ken had his MD when he shot himself at 25. Seems like he was doing just fine in terms of worldly success.

His dad was tormented, too. Lots of money, but he was always anxious, driven, and unfulfilled, and he projected it onto Ken. When Ken said he wanted to play football, his dad said, “I’ll break your hands myself.” He had decided Ken was going to be a surgeon. He didn’t want him injuring his hands.

Anyway, I live on a farm, I wear work shorts or work jeans every day, I drive a 2016 Ford, and I love taking my wife and son to Costco for lunch. I drink XO brandy; that’s true. But it’s Kirkland XO, for $48 per fifth. An amazing bargain.

I wonder what would happen if I went to a high school reunion wearing work jeans and suspenders and proceeded to be very open about myself. “I voted for Trump three times.” “I pray in tongues every day.” “I have a law license, I was very good at law, and it was easy, but I refuse to practice.” “I carry a 10mm pistol with a laser everywhere.” “I drive a tractor and cut my own trees.” “I mow my own yard.”

“My wife believes in submission to her husband.” That would go over great. Among the divorcees and spinsters. Those fulfilled modern ladies. Living their best lives.

One girl from my school went on to become the top dog at Miami’s Planned Parenthood branch. A long time ago, they sent me an invitation to a fundraiser. I tore it in half and mailed it back.

“Come on down and help us fund tearing apart babies in the womb for selfish, irresponsible sluts in the hope of reducing the black population!” No, and I don’t thank you for asking. God will judge you.

Why would anyone assume I supported abortion? Talk about a faux pas. “We went to high school together, so I just assumed you would want to come help my organization burn a cross and lynch a black man!”

I have always hated abortion, but now that I have a son, my understanding of the evil involved is much deeper. My wife and I prayed so hard that he would be born alive and without problems. We still pray for him and bless him all the time. Like all normal parents who aren’t sick in the head, we would give our lives for him without thinking. The thought of seeing his little body torn up in a pan so his mother could look better in a bathing suit or avoid suing me for child support is as horrifying as any thought I could ever have. I would much rather see myself in that condition.

Not to defend lynching, but at least some of the victims were murderers or rapists. What crime has a baby committed other than wanting to live and be loved by his parents?

I don’t have to worry about how I would be received at a reunion because I would never to back to Miami again unless I were forced by a court. I don’t even feel comfortable in Gainesville.

It’s amazing what feminism has turned mainstream Americans into. What could make a woman proud she tore her precious, helpless baby up? It comes straight from hell. God is male, period. He expects men to lead families. He never wanted us to be ruled by women; in Isaiah, it is mentioned as a curse.

Feminist brainwashing made it challenging for me to take over as a proper patriarch. I have been indoctrinated for over 50 years. It hasn’t stopped just because I overcome it. Every day, I have to dismiss it all over again.

What if God hadn’t pulled me out of it? I might be a Will Smith. A defeated cuckold with a demonized wife who humiliates me in public. A beaten father who raised an androgynous homosexual son, along with a lesbian daughter who is considerably more masculine.

No man wants to see his seed fall to the ground and rot.

My wife tells me she will be ready to go soon. She is fasting, and she wants to be at Costco when it ends.

Who can blame her?

Are You God’s Friend or his Customer?

I was praying this morning, and God showed me some things that will be extremely helpful.

My wife is always telling people that Christianity is not “transactional.” What a great way to put it. She has been trying to help an Indian friend understand this. He tells her about all the things he has done for God, and he wonders why things aren’t going better for him. She says Hinduism is transactional, and he has brought the Hindu mindset to Christianity.

Generally, around the globe, the forms of Christianity churches teach are transactional and therefore corrupt. Do this, stop doing that, and God will bless you and give you salvation.

This isn’t real Christianity. It’s the way pre-Messianic Judaism, Islam, and just about all the pagan religions work. Burn baby son alive at altar; get social credit and wealth. Cut off finger; get more help from voodoo spirits. Pay to put in football field at Catholic high school; get dad the whoremonger out of a part of hell that doesn’t really exist.

There is no one in purgatory, because it’s a fictional place, like Portland or Seattle. Oh, wait. Those places are real. It’s just hard to believe. Okay, let’s say Oz or Pandora.

Jews tell Gentiles–even Christians–they can get into heaven by obeying the seven Noahide laws, which, of course, are not in the Bible and not even a little bit valid. Transactional. Quid pro quo.

If it’s not about what you do for God, what is it about?

Pre-crucifixion Judaism was pretty transactional. There were a whole lot of laws to obey. This included the sacrificial system, which made the temple a place of continual butchering and roasting. It must have smelled wonderful.

Before the crucifixion, Jews generally didn’t know the Holy Spirit. God put his Spirit on a few here and there, and he didn’t rest in them all the time. The Jews had prophets and so on, but they were unusual.

Back then, Jews were not required to know God personally or exhibit the presence of his Spirit. They had to obey the rules, try to be good, and rely on sacrifices to get them past their failures.

After the crucifixion (after the first Shavuot–which we call Pentecost–following the crucifixion), Christians were fully expected to have the Holy Spirit live in them. Every Christian. All were supposed to know God personally, speak in tongues, receive revelation instead of relying on corrupt denominational doctrine, operate in the fruit and gifts of the Spirit, and so on.

The Holy Spirit is not an “it.” He is a person. We know “he” is appropriate, because the Holy Spirit inseminated a woman. Under pressure from Satan’s feminism, some churches have decided to claim the Holy Spirit is the feminine side of God, but that’s just misandry. No human woman can nurture like God, and God is male.

If he weren’t male, he wouldn’t have a bride.

I know the Holy Spirit. For that matter, I know Yeshua. I can’t summon Yeshua and have him come over for barbecue, but he came to me twice that I know of for certain, and the Holy Spirit’s presence is on me all the time, sometimes in an overpowering way and sometimes in a quiet, unintrusive way, like an engine at idle.

Sadly for me, knowing the Holy Spirit hasn’t instantly transformed me into a good person. The Bible compares God to a farmer and a potter; people whose work takes time to produce results. God keeps giving me correction over time, and the more time I spend with him, the faster the process goes.

I haven’t become perfect, but I really do hear from God all the time, and I get prophetic dreams. I receive miracles. I get special, generous, gentle treatment when other people who don’t listen to God have problems. For example, I had a blast in 2020, when everyone else was miserable. I loved that year.

Every year since then has been great, too, although these were years when the suffering of humanity was not as great as it was in 2020, so the contrast is not as stark.

Even though I know the Holy Spirit and believe in being blessed by grace, not as payment for services rendered, my relationship with God has continued to be somewhat transactional. It has been motivated partly by the knowledge that God does great things for me and saves me from horrible suffering. I should be motivated mainly by my love for God as a person; for his personality.

I have a wife. She does things for me, but not all that much. It’s not like she pays my bills or bakes me a cake every day. It’s unusual for me to ask her to do anything for me. I do more for her than she does for me. She says so herself, so stifle your feminist comments.

Taking her on increased my burdens a lot. I spend a lot on her. I have to consider her when I make plans and do things. Sometimes I have to wait a long time to get in the shower. I can’t always eat what I want, because she can’t stand some things I love. She rearranged my kitchen, which I had set up just the way I wanted it. She comes to me with her relatives’ problems.

I still love my wife. I want her to stay. I consider her a great gift. I don’t add up what we do for each other, compare, go to her, and complain. I’m very happy with our situation. Seems like I have a better attitude toward her than I do toward God, who has saved me from hell and set me aside from much of the misery other people endure.

The other day, God gave me a revelation of favor. He showed me that his attitude toward me was that of a father toward a favorite son.

We do more for our favorites. We give them much more slack; when they act up, they get reduced punishments or no punishment. The others get less from us. We just plain like our favorites better. We click with them. We want to do things for them, even when they’re out of line.

This revelation changed my life. It made it much easier for me to believe God would do things for me in spite of my past and ongoing sins. If I do something bad, I’m still his favorite. It’s just a bump in the road, to be driven past and forgotten. He’s not going to stop doing things for me, and he is also not going to stop battling my enemies.

We become furious at anyone who threatens a favorite. In that respect, we take after God. For example, the Bible says anyone who harms the Jews touches the pupil of God’s eye.

It’s not about my goodness, which barely exists. It’s about my status as his son, which Yeshua bought for me. I plead the blood of Yeshua as the basis for forgiveness and entry into the family of God, and God puts me in the VIP section. God bought me a relationship with him. He bought it from himself.

I am a favorite because God loves me, not because I build orphanages, give Kenneth Copeland Swiss watches, mention Yeshua sometimes while arguing with college students and being paid a king’s ransom, or walk to counterfeit Catholic shrines on my knees.

I should love God not because of what he does for me, but because he is the kind of person who does such things. I should love his personality and want to be with him just as I like being with friends.

We are told the dead surround God in heaven and praise him. They have nothing to gain from it, so why are they doing it? It has to be because they love him for what he is.

No one has to pay me to pick up my baby son or be with my wife. No one has to pay me to visit my friends.

When I get revelation, I always ask, “Why doesn’t anyone teach this?” Churches don’t teach it because the church was corrupted about two millennia ago. The ambitious people defeated the Spirit-led people, or, rather, they rejected them and the one who sent them. The Spirit-led continued to lead victorious lives and went on to heaven, and the ambitious people landed in hell, where they are to this day.

Revelation reminds me that “gospel” means “good news.” When you really know what God is up to, you realize it’s fantastic news. Being told you will go to heaven if you raise your hand for Joel Osteen, but that you shouldn’t expect to know God personally here on Earth, is not the kind of good news that makes people shout. Being told you have to sit through masses, bored to the edge of death, while effeminate old men mumble in Latin, and that this might eventually save you from hell, is not that kind of good news, either.

You can know God personally, and although you may be stuck here for a few decades, he will be with you, defeat your enemies, fill you with blessings, and let you feel his love and peace. You will know him as the best, most loving father there is, and not an absentee father.

The other night, my wife and I were talking, and we kept talking about how indispensable the Holy Spirit is. Every one of us is supposed to be taught by him directly, and only he keeps us from error. The vast majority of Christians reject him, and they believe any lie a crooked old pope or TV evangelist tells them.

Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson are great examples of carnal people who claim to be Christians and even to be doing God’s work, yet who are enemies of Yeshua. They are hostile to the Jews. Yeshua is the king of the Jews. It wasn’t just a derisive joke the Romans made. The Bible actually calls him “Israel.” Owens and Carlson are against the king’s subjects, so they are against the king.

America is full of Christians who insist opposing sodomy is unchristian. It’s full of Christians who think God loves socialism, which has been used to separate people from Yeshua and even the awareness of his existence all over the world. People can believe any stupid thing if they don’t know the Holy Spirit personally, and they do.

You can’t succeed with two-thirds of God.

Your pastor is almost certainly teaching you garbage along with the truth, and you need to learn directly from God so that when your pastor goes down, you will still be standing.

We Have to Delete Spam a Lot

I have a pretty significant pizza update.

I make my own pizza. My New York Style pizza is what I would call 75th-percentile quality by restaurant standards. Sometimes better. I keep changing it. My Sicilian is sublime and unrivaled.

Recently, I found out Restaurant Depot had opened a branch near me, and last week, I got a membership. Bliss.

I thought they would have Grande pizza cheese, because Grande is THE standard pizza cheese, but they did not. I tried what they had.

Their shredded offerings were no good. They had cellulose grit on them, and that ruins pizza. I tried two blocks of mozzarella. One was made by Saputo, and the name was Stella Top Grade. It wasn’t good, even for putting on salads. It might be good in lasagne or melted over spaghetti, but I wouldn’t count on it. I’m probably going to throw it out.

The other block was Restaurant Depot’s house brand, Supremo Italiano. Full-fat; low moisture. Back when I bought the cheese, I made a thin pie with Supremo Italiano on one side and Stella on the other.

They both seemed salty. I don’t know why, because that has not held up in further testing. The Stella threw off more grease, and while it was okay, it wasn’t great. The Supremo Italiano had a better texture, and the flavor was also better.

Later, I made a Sicilian with Supremo Italiano and Publix provolone. I am used to mixing mozzarella and provolone. The pizza was very good. I felt it could have been a little more tangy.

Today, I made an 8″-square Sicilian, and I changed a few things at once.

First, I used King Arthur Bread Flour, or, as pizza people call it, KABF. I have reason to believe I should be using it for NYC pies, so that’s why I bought it. I think it will improve the crust.

I have never been disappointed by any flour I used in a Sicilian. They all have different qualities, and I like them all. Thin pizza is more challenging.

Lately, I have been trying to make my Sicilians fluffier and taller. I have cut the salt to 1.5%. That’s supposed to help. Until today, I hadn’t used KABF in my fluffiness quest.

Second, I used Stanislaus 7/11 ground tomatoes for the sauce.

I have tried this product before. It was a long time ago. I was trying to recreate the sauce from a joint where I ate in college, and I found that Stanislaus paste sauces (paste, basil leaves, and citric acid) were closest, so I stuck with them. The one I really liked was Stanislaus Saporito.

In recent months, I have been thinking about sauces that taste different, so I have been fiddling with my Saporito sauce. Today I thought I should try ground tomatoes instead, since a lot of restaurants use them.

Third, I used Supremo Italiano on top. No provolone.

I baked this pie at 500, which is pretty hot, and the top didn’t burn at all except around the edges where the cheese touched the hot pan and fried.

It was very good. The crust was fluffy, and it was crunchy on the bottom. The sauce was a nice change of pace, and it was easier than diluting paste sauce. I didn’t have any Grande cheese to compare the Supremo Italiano too, but it seems to be just as good and possibly a little better.

The crust got damaged a little. It stuck to the pan in places. I think my wife may have washed the pan too hard.

I like cheese that doesn’t brown easily. Most pizza cheese we get at retail stores burns in a hurry. If a cheese doesn’t burn quickly, and you want a pizza that is fairly brown, you can make it happen, but if your cheese burns in a hurry, there isn’t a whole lot you can do. Maybe put foil on the rack above the pie.

I think I paid $2.15 per pound for the cheese. Maybe it was $2.17. Locally, the only other good mozzarella I can get costs about $10.20, which is outrageous.

This is the kind of cheese they used to use at Ray’s Pizza in New York. It didn’t burn, and it didn’t congeal fast as the pies cooled.

I mean the real Ray’s, not “Original Ray’s,” “Real Original Ray’s,” or “Seriously, This is The Original Ray’s and Not a Parasitic Knockoff Opened by Unscrupulous Foreigners who Look Like Pakistanis.” Ray’s used to hold the best-pizza title.

The crust on this pie was sufficiently similar to Pizza Hut pan pizza, I believe I could clone their product if I wanted. Pizza Hut is circling the drain, and I like their pan pizza. It would be great to make it at home once in a while.

That’s my story. I’m going to use KABF in a thin pie, and I expect to have even better news.

I Want Basic Fitness, not a Special Reinforced Toilet Seat

I mentioned my hopes of adding a very short strength-exercise routine to my life, and a commenter directed me to a guy named Mark Rippetoe, who runs an outfit called Starting Strength. It looks like this man trains competitive lifters as well as people who just want to be strong and resistant to injury.

I don’t plan to make major changes to my life, because those tend not to be permanent, but today I looked Rippetoe up out of curiosity. I don’t think he’s for me.

While I was looking into strength exercises yesterday, I saw that deadlifts were recommended by many sources. To do a deadlift, you lift a barbell from the floor, drag it up your legs until your back is perpendicular to the floor, and lock it in place. This is my own description, which may be flawed.

To me, this is a scary exercise. Anything that involves putting a lot of strain on my back while it’s in a horizontal orientation could cause something in the lumbar region to pop and be ruined forever.

Bruce Lee crippled himself lifting with his lower back. He put a 135-pound bar on his shoulders, bent over, and then straightened up. Something popped, and he spent the next 6 months in bed. He was in pain for the rest of his life.

The pathetic thing is that Lee was doing something he didn’t need to do. He weighed around 135 pounds, just like the bar, so he was lifting a lot of weight for his size. He was trying to build freak strength in a part of his body that didn’t need to be freakishly strong in order for him to make martial arts movies.

He wasn’t a professional martial artist. He never fought in a competition because he knew a loss would kill his reputation. He was a martial arts teacher and an actor who used martial arts in films. Steven Seagal made a lot of money in martial arts movies, and I’m not sure he was even able to squeeze through a gym door. Betty White could have made martial arts movies. She could have beaten up Chuck Norris, Seagal, Jason Statham, and Iron Man.

Movies aren’t real.

My back is strong and straight. I really try to resist lifting anything that could change that, even when other people are watching and I feel the nonsensical and unrealistic male urge to try to look strong.

I was checking out Rippetoe videos today when I saw him talking about the trapezius bar, which is a frame that replaces a barbell for some exercises. You stand inside it, and you grab two handles that run from back to front outside your feet.

A trap bar is supposed to make deadlifts safer because it allows you to do a very similar motion without cantilevering your back as much. All sorts of gurus recommend it. The Army’s experts decided to recommend it for soldiers, and Rippetoe made his video because this didn’t sit well with him.

He said the trap bar was less safe than a barbell, which is the opposite of what just about everyone else says. He says that during a deadlift, the pressure against the legs keeps a barbell from swinging around. He said the swinging was not a big deal with a 135-pound bar, but it could be dangerous at 400.

He kind of lost me there as a potential follower. When am I ever going to lift 400 pounds?

If I ever deadlifted even 200 pounds, I would be a very happy and surprised old man.

I would think that a good strategy would be to use the safer trap bar to build up to big weights and then switch to a barbell when my body was ready for it, but I’m just guessing. It seems like it would be easy to ruin my back by bending over a barbell long before I got to the weight level where the swinging of a trap bar could hurt me.

Today I read that a trap bar is much better for developing “explosive” strength, which is supposedly something you need for sudden everyday movements requiring substantial force. Things like catching yourself when you start to fall. That sounds like a good kind of strength to have.

I also saw him talk to a competitive powerlifter who said he was 6’4″ tall and weighed 215. Rippetoe told him he needed to weigh over 300 pounds, and the way to get there was to overeat.

Rippetoe is an older guy. Looks like he might be 70. He is clearly and indisputably obese. He looks unhealthy. I don’t think he’ll set a longevity record.

He told the young guy that if he stuffed himself with food, he would only put on muscle. He had another obese guy in the studio with him, and they were pushing the idea that the young guy would never become overweight by following Rippetoe’s plan.

Two obese guys, giving that advice on camera.

I did not find it credible.

Yesterday I saw a guy named Mike Burch on Youtube. He was 65 when he made a video. It showed him bench-pressing 405 pounds in a flannel shirt with no trick gym clothing. He said he weighed 165 pounds.

I guess my standards are low, but I thought that was pretty good. I would be quite satisfied with that. Half of that would be pretty good.

I did some rooting around on the web yesterday, and I learned that my notions of what a good bench press was were inflated. I thought all sorts of people were lifting 300 pounds, but it turns out anything over maybe 220 is very good, and not many men are legitimately benching a 300-pound bar with no funny shirts, drugs, or short strokes.

Men lie a lot about what they lift, of course. Sonny Barger, the despicable Hells Angels leader, claimed he benched 500 pounds. Never happened. Richard Marcinko led SEAL Team Six, and he claimed they all benched 500 pounds. Never happened. Lyle Alzado was one of the strongest men in the NFL, he was huge, he was as full of roids as a Mexican drugstore, and regardless of his impressive claims, when he had to lift on camera, he only made it to 400.

A lot of guys lift a bar off the supports, lower it three inches, push it back up and say they benched 350 or 400 or whatever. If it didn’t touch your chest, you didn’t bench it.

Yesterday I wrote about Volodimir Shmondenko, the Ukrainian lifter who weight about 175 pounds and benches 330. Again, I consider this acceptable. Right now I’m more like 330 with the decimal point moved one space to the left.

Both Burch and Shmondenko compete effectively, so I don’t know if Rippetoe’s advice makes any sense at all. Maybe it does, though. He’s a professional, after all.

If you deliberately make yourself 100 pounds overweight, you have some things to look forward to.

1. Insulin resistance
2. High blood pressure
3. Arthritis, especially in the knees
4. Exacerbated prostate enlargement
5. Blocked arteries
6. Diabetes
7. Impotence
8. Dementia
9. Reduced testosterone
10. Increased estrogen
11. Breasts

There are others.

My impression is that Rippetoe is looking to give people optimal, and I mean optimal, strength at any cost, and he seems pretty excited about competition, which is a bad mindset for a person who trains old ladies and dentists. I would think it would be hard to prevent advice for competitors from leaking into his advice for normal people who would like to live to be older than 60.

I would like to do very little work, take as little risk as possible, and get pretty decent results in comparison to the effort I put in. That would be great.

If there is one thing I know about exercise, it’s that the topic leads to constant feuds. Gym people are more obnoxious than the rest of us, and every trainer thinks the other trainers are wrong. Some people think Rippetoe is a genius. Others insiste he’s a moron. I don’t expect to be certain of the truth about his methods during this lifetime.